Triple portrait of Alexander H. Phillips
(Class of 1851), Hugh W. Henry (Class of 1851), and William
Wallace Phillips, ca. 1850s. Half-plate daguerreotype. Photographer
unknown.
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In the spring of 2000, the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton
University received a grant from the Friends
of the Princeton University Library to assist with the preservation
of cased photographic images in the Historical
Photograph Collection in the University Archives. This grant was
supplemented by a gift from Princeton University alumnus, Alexander
D. Stuart, Class of 1972. The goals of this project were to stabilize,
clean, and rehouse the cased images, ensuring their availability for
research in the Mudd Library for years to come.
Daguerreotypes and ambrotypes, two of the earliest photographic processes,
are unique, rare, and valuable images. The daguerreotype process,
in which a single positive image is reproduced on a copper plate coated
with silver, dates from 1839 and was popular until around 1860. The
ambrotype process, in which a single positive collodion-based image
is developed on a glass plate, dates from 1855 to 1865. While the
Historical Photograph Collection in the Princeton University Archives
contains approximately 20,000 paper photographic prints from the 1860s
to the present, there are only 77 daguerreotypes and ambrotypes in
the collection. These images, dating from the 1840s through the 1850s,
are the only extant photographic images to document the late antebellum
period at Princeton University. The condition of the cased images
before their preservation treatment was such that they could not be
safely handled; with the completion of this project researchers may
now come to the Mudd Library to study this valuable collection. This
online exhibition highlights a small number of the images that were
a part of this project.
Notes on viewing the exhibit
continue with photographic processes
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