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Fotografia - Invenção
The French firm Susse Frères manufactured a daguerreotype camera
which was one of the first two photographic cameras ever sold to the public.
The company was also engaged in the foundry business
and owned a large foundry in Paris.
On the 19th of August 1839, François
Arago publicly unveiled the previously secret details of
the daguerreotype process, the first publicly
announced photographic process. Two months earlier,
on the 22nd of June 1839, its inventor Louis
Daguerre had signed contracts with two manufacturers, Alphonse
Giroux and Maison Susse Frères, Place de la Bourse 31, Paris, to
produce the first commercially available photographic cameras. The
two companies were granted exclusive rights to make and sell the special camera
obscura designed by Daguerre, as well as the several lesser
items of equipment needed to work the process.
The only known surviving Susse Frères daguerreotype camera,
made in 1839, is on display in the permanent camera museum of the WestLicht
auction house in Vienna, Austria.
According to expert Michael Auer, the camera's lens was made by
optician Charles Chevalier and its brass mount is hand-engraved "No3"
and "III", indicating that it is only the third lens Chevalier made
for a daguerreotype camera. In the 19th century, it was common for makers to
serially number their lenses. The glass lens itself is an 81 mm
diameter meniscus achromatic
doublet, concave surface foremost, and has a focal length of
382 mm. The front of the brass lens barrel features a diaphragm with a fixed 27 mm diameter
opening, giving the lens an effective working aperture of slightly over f/14.
Attached to the diaphragm is a manually operated pivoting brass shutter,
sufficient for its purpose because of the very long exposures required.
The camera, constructed according to Daguerre's specifications,
was designed for making 8.5x6.5 inch (216x167 mm) "whole
plate" daguerreotypes and optimized for photographing landscapes. No claim
was made that either the camera or the daguerreotype process itself, in its
then-current state of development, was suitable for portraiture.
The cameras made by the competing manufacturer, Alphonse Giroux
et Compagnie, are nearly identical. There are only two obvious differences:
their color and their labels. The Giroux cameras were made of hardwood and have
a varnished natural wood finish, while the Susse Frères camera was made of a
softer wood and painted black. The labels on Giroux cameras are ornate and
framed in a brass oval. They declare (in French) that "no apparatus is
warranted unless it bears the signature of M[onsieur] Daguerre and the seal of
M[onsieur] Giroux". They feature a small red wax seal dated with the year
and were actually hand-signed by Daguerre. The Susse Frères camera has a
simpler octagonal label claiming only that the camera was made "according
to the official plans deposited by M[onsieur] Daguerre at the Ministry of the
Interior".
Each lens had to be individually hand-made by expert opticians
and machinists and it accounted for most of the price of the camera. The Giroux
camera sold for 400 francs, the plainer Susse Frères version cost 350 francs.
Neither sum represented a casual purchase or was affordable to the average
citizen. In 1839, 350 francs meant a pile of silver coins, or a small stack of
gold coins containing a total of over three troy ounces of pure gold, or the
more convenient gold-redeemable paper equivalent.
Although Théodore Maurisset's contemporary humorous
lithograph La Daguerréotypomanie depicts a throng of customers
besieging the Susse Frères establishment and carrying away cameras at a
prodigious rate, and although at least fifteen of the cameras made by Giroux
still exist, no examples of the Susse Frères version were known until one came
to light in 2006. It was found among the effects of Günter Haase, formerly a
Professor in the Department of Scientific Photography at the University of
Frankfurt. Haase had received it as a gift from a colleague who died in 1963.
It was sold at auction in 2007 for a final price of €580,000.
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