photography

Mirrored from either side

Invented in 1854, the mass-produced 6-by-9 centimeter carte de visite photograph was at its peak of collectible popularity during the 1860s, when Oliver Wendell Holmes remarked,

So Thomas Wentworth Higginson was only exhibiting the common taste of 1862 when he asked Emily Dickinson for her picture. He would have been startled by the first sentence of her reply: “Could you believe me without?” Miss Dickinson went on to explain:

It often alarms Father – He says Death might occur, and he has Molds of all the rest, but has no Mold of me, but I noticed the Quick wore off those things, in a few days, and forestall the dishonor – You will think no caprice of me –

   The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell (Harvard University Press, 2024), no. 345.

And no image followed, then or ever after.

But before, when she was only sixteen, a single earlier image was graven. It was a daguerreotype: an early kind of photograph which was reflective, like a mirror, and unique: lacking a negative and therefore reproducible only by rephotographing. That description sounds like a metaphor custom-fitted for a Dickinson Diana, but the 1847 daguerreotype is mostly generality. William C. North, the traveling “Daguerrian artist” who uncovered his lens in the presence of Emily Dickinson, performed exactly the same repertoire for her mother: pose, prop book and all. Nor was he killed by his own dogs for his presumption.

Daguerreotypes are pitiable on their own terms, too. Consisting only of a thin mercury-amalgam film deposited on a hard surface, a daguerreotype has to be shielded behind glass, and any contact with anything else that’s hard will leave a permanent mark. Over time, contact will be almost unavoidable. And if you try merely to look hard, aided by a lens or a video program, the blemished metal superficies will defeat your vision right there.

But I ask you to run the video once again, this time under the control of a program that commands, “Clean the metal with benzoyl peroxide, but leave the flesh to its blemishes.”

More detail will appear, but it will be only surface detail. Even after it has scribed itself into metal, it will remain only gossip.  “With a metallic grin,” it will titter that sixteen-year-old Emily’s acne was bad and she may have had her hair in a net.* You’ve been trying to penetrate, but you’re still only skating across the impenetrable.

But keep skating. Skate on until you freeze into a snow queen. Because most daguerreotypes  are mirror images, I think we’re warranted in asking Photoshop to reverse itself and make the queen’s icy image our own mirror. Look, therefore. Wait five seconds.

And see: this image’s eye is capable of piercing any lens between itself and you, whether it’s a lens of glass or a lens of vitreous humor. The imaged body moves itself from side to side, toward you.

How ‘scape you killing?

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* Fr243, “That after horror”

This* obvious to the senses


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*.John Amos Comenius (Jan Amos Komenský, 1592-1670). Of this Renaissance humanist, Wikipedia says, “Comenius introduced a number of educational concepts and innovations including pictorial textbooks written in native languages instead of Latin, teaching based in gradual development from simple to more comprehensive concepts, lifelong learning with a focus on logical thinking over dull memorization, equal opportunity for impoverished children, education for women, and universal and practical instruction.” (August 4, 2026)

Humors and time

According to the Library of Congress, the oldest photograph of a cat in the collection is probably a daguerreotype cataloged as “Unidentified man with cat, three-quarter length portrait, full face, seated” and given the call number http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3d01979. Annotating it for a 2026 blogpost titled “Kittintypes,” the Library conscientiously stipulated that it is nothing but an image. It isn’t even an image of a cat, because it has no cat papers. Libraries exist to transact documents, but this cat and her man are undocumented. We don’t know their names, or where they lived, or how. The nominal when issued to them by the Library (“Between 1840 and 1860”) was only an approximation deduced from the general history of photography, and the only why that’s perceptible on the daguerreotype’s silver surface is a mirror image of your lensed self, reader!, in the instant of your reading at present. History’s one-word language, was, whited itself out before it could turn into is or I know or I am.

But is it an inaudible smile that we hear echoing, even so, through the silent aftermath retrospectively called Unidentified Man with Cat?

If it is, perhaps it signifies that the body fluids called humors have all along been filling the bodily spaces that we happen smilingly to share with Cat, even though we are Men. We weren’t always unidentified. Perhaps one day we will be identifiable again: and this time knowably, because this time to ourselves.


Inside the frame that has protected the daguerreotype image’s delicate silver-mercury amalgam down the years from the touch of fingers, something seems to have illuminated everyone’s visual understanding of a man showing a cat to you with an Egyptian gesture. Open the image frame, clear the haze with your computer, let the silver cat reflect light into your face, and watch yourself. In the catlight, you seem to have known all along that you are happy after all.

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Kristi Finefield, “Kittintypes: Nineteenth-Century Cats in the Daniel Carter Beard Collection.” https://blogs.loc.gov/picturethis/2026/06/kittintypes-nineteenth-century-cats-in-the-daniel-carter-beard-collection/?loclr=eaptb