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| Louis Jacques Daguerre's Paris Boulevard (1839) |
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| Edgar A. Poe |
Poe implies that through this insidious transformation, temporal loveliness approaches the perfection of eternal beauty, and theoretically at least the corpse of the dead woman briefly incarnates an ideality. But because death also entails physiological decay, the beauty of the just-departed contains an element of terror, since the passage of time implies a subsequent and inevitable mutation to loathsomeness…. The dying woman became a sign of her own fate, and her dissolution presented a spectacle at once irresistible and unbearable.
Above, the difference between critical and photo portraits.
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The daguerreotype is a unique photographic image allowing no reproduction of the picture. The image is formed by amalgam i.e. a combination of mercury and silver.
