Last year, in Hartford, there was a wonderful moment when I was in the company of six modern daguerreotypists, with some of most preeminent persons in the field being present. The conversation was jovial and earnest, with briskly changing topics of wide array. For a brief moment the chat drifted toward processes taking place during daguerreotype image-particle formation. I'm not an expert in this by any means, as I've never had opportunities to work with laboratory equipment that is needed for proper analysis of such things, so I was mostly a fly on the wall there, while drawings of electro-chemical charges were sketched in pencil atop an authentic Jenny Lind daguerreotype-era posing table. There was one thing though that I feel I may have contributed. I mentioned the purposeful use of latent ghost image with in some of my works, and showed a few examples where I utilized this seemingly unexplored method of image-making. I explained that to achieve this my intermediary images were wiped without being gilded, which seems to strongly suggest that voids in silver found beneath image particles were initially formed by process of development. For the past few months I've been pondering this, and waiting to dive back into image creation. As luck would have it, the winged mused of inspiration made its way to me all the way from Brazil. A collaborative game initiated by Simone Wicca, a very creative modern daguerreotype artist from San Paolo, spurred on the appearance of the image below.
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| Sun - Daguerreotype Sabattier Effect and Morsiple Exposure on Silver Coin - View 1 |
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Sun - Daguerreotype Sabattier Effect and Morsiple Exposure on Silver Coin - View 2
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The game Simone came up with involves us alternately setting a theme for an image and then interpreting that theme however we wish with a daguerreotype. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, not if you overthink everything like I usually do... The first assignment was set by Simone, and it was to "capture a sun ray and hold it in hermetic vessel". I will admit that upon reading this my mind went blank. By their essence each daguerreotype made via natural light is already capturing a sun beam, and all finished daguerreotypes themselves become hermetic vessels upon being finished and sealed. This thought messed with my mind, as I didn't want to make 'just another dag', and so it took me forever and a half to come up with the image featured here.
Continuing my personal journey into exploring alternative substrates to make dags with, I had an idea of seeing how it would work on a coin made of 999 silver. While the official US mint has issued a few such coins that I could have used, it is not only illegal to destroy currency, but also seemed rather boring to me. Instead I looked around and found that a few private mints dealing with precious metals make coins with all sorts of cool designs. Golden State Mint is located in Florida, and coin that I purchased was minted by them around 2016 (just about the time when I got decent at making daguerreotypes). Part of Chris Duane's Silver Bullet Silver Shield series, this coin was designed by Heidi Wastweet, and it deals with concepts of debt slavery in a satirical manner, which was appealing to me. Also, the innermost text on the side that I kept intact reads "listen to all, follow none", and this has been my approach to the art of photography and life in general.
Once proper equipment was procured, it actually took almost no time to shave off the deign from one side of the coin and to produce a mirror polish where once a rather high-relief image of a skeleton-banker once appeared. To do this I first employed a belt sander with 60 grit paper, and then 180 grit, after which I laid some 400 grit sand paper on a table and manually smoothed it a bit more. Then it was on to NuShine SII and orbital sander, and finishing with lamp black as always.
Without diving too deep into all the symbolism this image is laden with, I'll touch briefly upon a few themes and let the reader's imagination roam and pick up on more minute nuances.
Diameter of this coin is 39mm. In Taoist practice odd numbers under 10 are considered to be that of heaven and movement, while even numbers relate Earth and stillness. 3 and 9 are most powerful of the heavenly set, because three gives birth to myriad of things and what can be stronger than that other than three threes? Sun resides in heaven, and Simone's theme made it all too natural to strive to fix the sun directly upon this object.
Some of my readers may have seen my Morsiple Exposure post from 2021, where I figured out not to use the movement of the sun across the heavens in combination with Morse Code to write out simple messages. Morse code having strict rules about length of pauses and dashes as they relate to width of dots meant that exposure times are nonnegotiable. As it happens, spelling the word SUN takes 48min to execute, which is my age at the moment. My mind wanders now thinking that, unlike 3 and 9, 4 and 8 are both Earthly numbers, but somehow 4+8=12 and 1+2=3, so.... Things and people fluctuate between positive and negative right before our eyes, and so I ventured to create an image where me and the sun would both switch back and forth. Ordinarily daguerreotypes are best viewed by reflecting something dark into it while lighting the face. When one reflects something bright into the silver mirror that is daguerreotype, like a light source or the sky, the image becomes negative. The use of latent ghost image allowed me to create a daguerreotype that is viewable in both lighting scenarios, and in fact must be appreciated in both. When dark values are reflected into it as usual, my image is negative and Morse-code-sun is positive. However, as soon as you start bringing the angle of this daguerreotype close to reflecting sun or another light source, the sun becomes negative, while my self portrait gains back all its original positive values in full detail.
All daguerreotypes are best viewed while being hand-held by the viewer, with this one being no exception. The 52 second video below attempts to capture such experience. First, two stills are shown again, then you can see the coin with water on it just about to be gilded. At the end we see the finished piece as it appears in artificial daylight balanced light and then direct sun.
As hard as I looked, I couldn't find any previous examples of daguerreotypes of this nature. While someone may have made an image on a coin, I'll be actually really surprised if nobody has, I don't think anyone has previously employed what basically amounts to the good old Sabattier Effect with daguerreotype medium, so I believe this is the first time. I was truly pleased with the final result of my latest experiment and the Mackie line effects achieved, and I'll keep exploring this avenue a bit more.
Anton
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