My first reaction of seeing the panorama, I was just really stunned.

The Cincinnati 1848 daguerreotype is truly as a feat in many different ways.

Everything rendered in just gorgeous, sort of almost limitless detail.

It was an amazing accomplishment.

It’s called the Mona Lisa of daguerreotype.

It is a stunning image of a city that was the sixth largest one in the nation at the time.

On September 24, 1848, photographers Charles Fontayne and William Porter positioned their daguerreotype camera on a rooftop in Newport, Kentucky.

At 1:55 PM, they opened the lens cap, exposing the second of eight daguerreotype plates to the sunlight.

When the plates were combined, Fontayne and Porter captured Cincinnati’s riverfront in a landmark panorama that astonished the world.

I’m a history nut, and I just could not believe that’s the city that I’m from, and there it is in 1848 in all its glory.

It’s the first comprehensive panoramic photograph of an American city.

And it shows a cross section of America at a pivotal moment.

Preserved today in the Cincinnati Public Library, Fontayne and Porter’s masterpiece received international acclaim.

Yet this extraordinary panorama is just one of many incredible images that made greater Cincinnati a center for the development of American photography.

Here, dozens of photographic pioneers used science, artistry, and enterprise to establish a new medium.

Document history, and capture life.

Join us as we explore the first three decades of our region’s remarkable photographic heritage.

This program was made possible with support from Ohio Humanities.

The National Endowment for the Humanities, America 250, Ohio.

The Tommy and Sarah Anness Evans Family Fund and the Martha Garrison Anness Memorial Fund.

FotoFocus and these generous donors.

Before photography, Americans illustrated the central Ohio River valley in a variety of art forms.

Artists depicted everything from nature and landscapes to buildings and historic events.

The accuracy of the image depended on the skill and style of the artist.

Personal portraits were a luxury few could afford.

In 1839, news from Europe of two scientific reports made by Daguerre and Talbot changed everything.

In January in 1839, Daguerre’s process was announced in general terms to the body of French government, a scientific body of the French government.

Very quickly afterwards, Talbot, William Henry Fox Talbot in the UK, in England, announced to an equivalent body, if you will, in his own in his own country that he too, had developed a photographic process and indeed had done so earlier than than Daguerre.

Louis Jacques-Mande Daguerre presented his daguerreotype process in Paris.

Daguerre coated a polished copper plate with silver iodide.

This light sensitive plate was exposed to a scene through the lens of a camera.

The plate was developed with mercury vapors, then fixed or stabilized with a hyposolution of sodium thiosulfate.

The result was a direct positive image of unbelievable clarity.

William Henry Fox Talbot had been experimenting for several years with the art of photogenic drawing.

He placed an object onto a sheet of paper coated with salt and silver nitrate.

The paper was left in sunlight, leaving a negative image, which was fixed with salt water.

During the 1840s, Talbot refined his process using a camera, silver iodide, gallic acid, and hyposulfite to create a paper negative.

A second coated paper was then placed on top of the negative to create a positive print.

Talbot named this process a calotype.

Even before extremely detailed account of the processes were available in the United States, there was a whole group of people who had already been working on it, essentially themselves in the US who had enough scientific knowledge, who had enough knowledge of chemistry to have already been dabbling or already been doing their own researches, or simply to be for the information that this was possible and it had been done.

One of those scientists was a resident of Cincinnati, the incredible Dr. John Locke.

In the spring of 1839, Dr. Locke experimented with Talbot’s process for photogenic drawings.

Dr. John Locke was a polymath like so many of the early figures in photography.

He was a botanist, he was a chemist, he was a medical doctor, he was a geologist.

He was eventually a professor at the medical college here in Cincinnati, which is a very early medical college.

He is known to have successfully made a paper photographic negatives, essentially tonally reversed contact prints.

Months before Talbot’s process was made public, Locke’s photogenic drawings were displayed in Alexander Flash’s bookstore on Third Street.

They were the first photographs ever exhibited in the United States.

The two competing photographic processes had strengths and weaknesses.

Daguerreotypes were sharp, but one of a kind.

There was no negative for duplication.

Daguerreotypes also needed a special case to protect them from scratches and oxidization.

Calotypes were soft, grainy, and tended to fade, but one negative could produce multiple positive copies.

However, the biggest difference was in the business models of the two men.

Talbot tried to patent his calotype process.

In August of 1839, Louis Daguerre and the French government made the daguerreotype process free to the world.

It is really amazing how quickly that information disseminated not only to the US but to other places throughout the world.

We see an explosion of people armed with the more detailed information that Daguerre had made available getting into the field of photography.

During the 1840s, Greater Cincinnati was poised to become a major commercial center.

The Ohio River was a gateway to the west and south, and a boundary between slave and free states.

Greater Cincinnati was a destination for German, Irish, British, and Jewish immigrants seeking a better life in America.

It was a hub for shipping, manufacturing, and agriculture, and a center for publishing, education, and the arts.

But the region was also experiencing serious social conflicts.

Slavery was legal in Kentucky.

Ohio’s black laws oppressed free African Americans, and mob violence targeted abolitionists and black communities across America.

The 1840s was a dynamic decade with extraordinary people making national history, all of them camera ready.

Photography sort of bursts on the scene at a moment when a lot of things were changing.

You often hear people cite three really important things that happen right around that sort of 1840 moment.

The advent of photography, some changes in the technology of the telegraph or information could travel to you, you know, in the snap of a finger and the railroad what was far or, you know, 12 days distant was no longer far.

It wasn’t so much, I think, a story of total rupture, but of expansion and slight transformation of the desire that people already had for images and all the functions and uses and practices that pictures were already part of at that time.

Greater Cincinnati was a prize market for the first professional photographers.

In August of 1841, the region’s first daguerreotype studio opened on Third Street.

Hawkins and Todd advertised they were prepared to furnish the most perfect photographic portraits.

Ezekiel Hawkins, as best we know, was an artist, which is interesting to me because you’ll often hear him described as a sign painter or a painter of curtains.

We do have evidence to suggest that he was actually a fine artist.

Hawkins learned the duerreotype process by exchanging letters with Professor Samuel F. B. Morse.

Morse is well known as the inventor of the telegraph, but he is also called the father of American photography for introducing the daguerreotype to the nation and mentoring some of the earliest practitioners.

By 1843, Hawkins had formed a partnership with Thomas Faris.

The two men operated at Daguerrian gallery on Fifth Street.

Daguerreotype studios were often located on the top floor of buildings.

Photographers needed large windows or skylights to let in as much sunlight as possible.

They also needed special camera equipment, chemicals and furnishings.

Once you’re talking about setting up a studio, there’s a whole other level of kit that one would need, you know, certain types of furniture, you need the housings that daguerreotypes are placed into, so the cases, the velvets, the metal or frames that are put around on the glass, you need backdrops, you need all sorts of things, which is one of the reasons why it’s such an economic stimulant when it really gets going.

By 1843, daguerreotype exposure times had dropped from several minutes to 10 to 60 seconds, depending on the light.

Subjects were kept still with headclamps.

Smiling was discouraged to avoid facial movement.

Depending on its size, a daguerreotype costs from $3 to $6 in the early 1840s.

That’s about $120 to $250 today.

For an additional fee, Hawkins and Faris offered hand colored daguerreotypes.

Touches of paint made sitters more lifelike.

The first daguerreotype clients were often wealthy business leaders.

Their families, politicians, and celebrities.

Much like today, celebrity requires other people to be interested in seeing your image, having your image and disseminating your image.

It was not dissimilar in the 19th century.

So for a celebrity to allow a photographer to take their picture was a form of publicity.

For photographers, there was a there was, I think, symbiotic is the right way to put it, because as a photographer, you’re building your own renown by being associated with photographing very important personages.

and often it might be on view in your studio, in your in your place of business, which people might come to see it, these studios were not just places to make photographs, they were places of assembly, there were places to come see amazing things, places to see edifying things before there were places like art museums, certainly, in Cincinnati.

Ezekiel Hawkins quickly recognized the camera’s role in recording history.

In 1845, just four years after opening his studio, Hawkins presented a retrospective, a daguerreotype exhibit honoring Cincinnati’s oldest residents.

Hawkins’ gallery of pioneers of this city is the most interesting tableau vivant imaginable.

Mr. H is at once an artist and a daguerreotypist, the father of the art in the West.

We wish our citizens to be aware that they need not cross the Atlantic for the finest daguerreotypes.

Tragically, most of Hawkin's daguerreotypes were destroyed by a fire that gutted his studio in the Apollo building in 1851.

What I regret most is the loss of my collection of old pioneers that I had been collecting for the past 10 years.

Somehow, a few of Hawkins daguerreotypes of older Cincinnati residents have survived.

Hawkins was well known both in the United States and abroad.

He was also regarded as very good at what he did, so people not only in other parts of the United States, but even in Europe would acknowledge him as one of the finest makers of daguerreotypes in the United States, and actually not too long after the invention of photography, much to the irritation of Europeans, many people thought that Americans were better at the daguerreotype than Europeans were.

So being a good American daguerreotypist was pretty good.

Charles Fontayne and William Porter pushed photography to new heights.

In 1848, the two men made history when they created their world renowned work, Daguerreotype View of Cincinnati.

The story behind the preservation of the panorama is also extraordinary.

It was purchased by the Cincinnati Public Library from a descendant of William Porter in 1948.

Carl Vitz, library director, and Captain Frederick Way conducted extensive research on the work.

The detail of this photograph is just extraordinary.

One person loved it because there’s 32 named boats in the photograph.

It has our second train station captured clearly.

The bridge over the Erie Canal.

You can see people, you can see animals, you can see inside of people’s windows.

Digital photography is just catching up to the quality of this photograph that was taken in 1848.

Vitz and Way determined the date the panorama was made from weather reports, river levels and steamboat schedules.

They calculated the camera’s exposure time by tracing the distance of a ghost carriage.

50 years later, the panorama was restored and scanned at the laboratory of the George Eastman Museum.

High resolution images confirmed the time on the clock tower of the Second Presbyterian church seen in the second plate.

It was 1:55 PM.

What you can learn from the panorama is really endless, depending on what you’re wanting to look at.

Historically, you could see the way people were living in 1848.

Architectural styles, what people were wearing, a woman’s back porch, and she’s got her laundry hanging.

It’s a back porch facing the river, so it was not expected to be seen by anyone other than her.

She could not have conceived of an Internet where the world is viewing her undergarments.

If you’d gone back 50 years in time, there wouldn’t been riverboats on the Ohio River, but in 1848, it was the super highway heading west.

and this photo captures America at that time.

In just one decade, photography rose from a scientific experiment into a thriving business, and Greater Cincinnati emerged as a national center for the development of a new medium, photography.

By 1850, Cincinnati had become the sixth largest city in the United States.

The region was an economic powerhouse.

32 daguerreotype studios were operating in Cincinnati alone.

The studios employed over 78 people.

Their economic value was estimated at $80,000.

That’s about $3.3 million today.

Yet boiling beneath the region’s prosperity, tension was mounting over the issue of slavery.

The 1850s was a decade of spectacular growth, and escalating discord in Greater Cincinnati.

Photography would both capture and help to shape a crucial time in our nation’s history.

Photographers were constantly improving their craft.

During the 1850s, Charles Fontayne claimed to have produced the world’s first life size photographic portrait.

Ezekiel Hawkins patented a system for treating color photographs, But the greatest innovation came from English photographer Frederick Scott Archer.

In 1851, Archer freely published his collodion process on glass.

The process involves pouring a mixture called collodion, which I believe is made from a gun cotton that is dissolved, and as it is exposed to air, it becomes it moves through a stage where it is tacky.

That surface becomes an agent that can absorb silver.

The plate, whether it’s metal or glass coated in collodion, is then saturated in silver nitrate.

It becomes lights sensitive.

It’s then put immediately into a camera.

Exposure is made, and the plate is then developed immediately, and hence the name wet plate, because all these processes have to occur before the collodion has totally dried.

So it’s a bridge between that clarity, the pristine quality, the daguerreotype, and then the reproducibility, the democracy of a reproducible negative.

The wet plate collodion process led to two popular photographic formats, the ambrotype and the tintype.

So an ambrotype is a photograph that was taken in a positive process that is on a glass backing.

So this image also is in a case because these similar to a daguerreotype needed to be cased for their protection and their longevity.

A tintype was definitely a durable photograph in many different ways in that it was actually made, not on tin, but on iron, and so it was a positive print onto metal.

Tintypes are pretty hearty and can hold up in most conditions.

More and more photographers took their cameras out of the studio and into the field.

Fontayne and Porter made this portrait of a local family seated in their garden.

Several workers are posed in the background.

Photographers began to capture life in smaller communities.

Daguerreotype studios spread into surrounding counties.

A dozen studios were established in Warren County alone.

In the 1840s, Lebanon and Warren County was literally a political powerhouse.

People underestimate, but we had more political clout than most of the major cities in the state of Ohio.

Part of that was the fact that we had so many important people.

It was the political influence of all of these well to do families that attracted the daguerreotypists and the early tintypists and ambrotypists, and you name it to the county.

And it wasn’t just Lebanon.

Early on, there were people interested in those processes in Franklin, in Springboro, in Waynesville, in Palmyra, which you now know as Mason, but it was scattered throughout the county.

There seemed to be an appetite for this new, affordable way of capturing an image.

During the 1850s, women also entered the profession in Greater Cincinnati.

However, there are few records of their work.

Some city directory listings and newspaper accounts, but only a few rare images of, or attributed to, about seven female photographers who broke a rigid glass ceiling.

This includes a photographer from Lebanon, Minerva Corwin.

Minerva Corwin was the first cousin of Governor Thomas Corwin.

and she started advertising in May of 1853, that she was now producing likenesses of daguerrean types.

We don’t know how successful she was, but she was successful enough that for 20 months straight, she advertised every week in the local newspaper, the Western Star.

Having a female in any occupation at that time, be successful and competing with males was quite extraordinary and a forerunner for photography, but also for a female entrepreneurs.

During the 1850s, another photographer would shatter just about every social barrier.

James Presley Ball was a renowned photographer and internationally acclaimed photographer who lived in Cincinnati from the mid 1840s to about 1871, and he produced a huge body of work, well over a thousand photographic images, including daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, carte de visité, cabinet cards, stereo views, and beyond.

He had a remarkable career that lasted for over half a century.

Ball was a successful entrepreneur, an artistic collaborator, and a bold abolitionist leader.

JP Ball was a completely unique character at this time in history.

I mean, here you have this incredibly charismatic African American man who is a fabulous technician as a photographer, who engages really influential and important white men not only in Cincinnati, but across a nation and in Europe.

I mean, this is a guy who is free during the time of slavery and making remarkable strides in society and professionally.

James Presley Ball was born a free person of color in Frederick County, Virginia, in 1825.

He learned to make daguerreotypes from John B. Bailey, another African American photographer.

In 1845, the two men likely made this daguerreotype of the White Sulphur Springs resort known today as the Greenbrier.

In 1849, Ball established a permanent studio in Cincinnati.

His great daguerrean gallery of the west would become one of the most successful studios in America.

Ball brought a lot of skills to Cincinnati and perhaps among the greatest were his indomitable spirit, his energy and his entrepreneurial drive, and in fact he he was called, the indefatigable and wealthy Ball of Cincinnati.

Beyond this, he had a great eye for poses, for placing people before scenery, for lighting, because he would be using a skylight at this time, of course, it was no electricity, and he had um superb equipment.

He was also really gifted at advertising.

So he promoted himself constantly in the Cincinnati Enquirer, the Cincinnati Commercial, the Daily Gazette.

People would come to his studio because he would appeal to the thrifty minds of Cincinnatians with ads that would say things like, why go to Ball's studio?

Because his images are among the most lifelike, they are the most durable and they are the cheapest.

Ball’s great daguerrean studio was a family business.

He employed his father, William, his brothers, Robert and Thomas, his sister Elizabeth, and his brother in law, Alexander Thomas.

Ball had a large studio.

It was four rooms on the third, fourth and fifth, floors of a building, and it had large mirrors.

It had velvet covered chairs on which people could set a table with a round table with a tablecloth on it, where people could view their images in small format and large format, and that while you wait it for your picture to be painted by the sunbeams, that a piano would be played for you.

He also had sculpture in the gallery, so it was a very fashionable place to go.

Cincinnatiians white and black, Christian and Jew all over the region flocked to his studio because of these reasons.

At it's peak, Ball’s studio employed over a dozen white and black men as assistants.

He also hired several artists.

Paul employed a number of African Americans, including the very famous landscape painter Robert Seldon Duncanson.

Duncanson provided services for him, including tinting the photographs with colorization, like gold leaf or jewelry or rosy cheeks.

He would make people look more alive.

And in addition, he helped to design and paint backdrops as scenery in the studio.

And then in return, Ball exhibited Duncanson’s landscapes in his grand daguerrean gallery to promote the images of both of them, so they would both profit from the joint enterprise.

In 1857, James Ball added a business partner, Alexander Thomas.

Ball and Thomas served a wide range of clients for the next 13 years.

Their portfolio features hundreds of business, political and religious leaders.

and numerous local residents, including rare images of African Americans.

His African American clients were fewer, because in Cincinnati in the 1850s, they made up less than 3% of the population, but they included people like Miss Mattie Allen and Waddy Shelton Polk, a little boy.

So we’re lucky to have their names written on the back of those photographs that are in the archives.

Ball developed close ties to the region’s powerful abolitionist community.

He photographed dozens of abolitionist leaders, including one man who understood the power of an authentic image.

The most important person who came to Ball studio was Frederick Douglass.

And, Ball photographed him when he visited it in 1867.

So this was just about 12 years after Douglass had published his autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, and he came here to give a lecture.

Ball not only photographed abolitionist leaders, he was an abolitionist leader.

In 1854, Ball commissioned Robert S. Duncanson, along with other artists to create a massive panorama to protest slavery.

One of the most important things that he did was to commission an enormous anti-slavery panorama that documented the slave trade from its beginning in Nigeria and West Africa down through the southern ports of Charleston and New Orleans, up the great waterways of Mississippi to Ohio, and then finally to freedom in Queenston, Canada.

This was a mind blowing panorama.

It was apparently 12 feet high by 1800 feet long, and it was a huge painting that would be shown wound on two cylinders.

and it would take two to 2 1/2 hours to see all of these scenes.

Stage hands would provide sound and lighting effects, and there would be a narrator describing the scenes as they unrolled.

Ball’s mammoth pictorial tour premiered in Cincinnati in March of 1855.

The tour continued to Boston.

The panorama has been lost to time, but the tour pamphlet with descriptions of each painted scene survives.

James Ball took his family to England, where he reportedly photographed Charles Dickens and Queen Victoria.

He returned to Cincinnati, where he operated a series of studios before leaving Cincinnati for good in 1871.

He continued to work as a photographer in Mississippi, Louisiana, Missouri, Minnesota, Montana, and Washington.

In 1904, James Ball, suffering from rheumatism, died in relative obscurity in Honolulu, Hawaii.

But his incredible legacy lives on in dozens of archives throughout the United States.

We should remember and celebrate the life of James Presley Ball because he was a remarkable photographer at a time when our nation was torn apart by discrimination and prejudice, and for this man to have produced such an incredible anti-slavery panorama, to have produced portraits of people from all walks of life, from all classes, from all religions, many African Americans.

It’s really something to celebrate.

It’s something that is part of our American heritage and the face of our country.

During the 1850s, photographers captured the vibrant people, places, and culture of Greater Cincinnati.

Soon, photographers would document a civil war.

In April of 1861, the bombardment of Fort Sumter signaled the start of the American Civil War.

Within two days of the fort's evacuation, photographers were already recording the damage.

Throughout the war, the first generation of American photojournalists would document the battles, soldiers, and freedom seekers during a monumental fight that changed history.

Greater Cincinnati quickly mobilized for war.

The region became a major recruitment and training center for tens of thousands of the Union Army troops.

Soldiers and sailors packed photographic studios, eager to have their portrait taken before heading into battle.

Many of them mailed a carte de visité or tintype to loved ones back home.

A carte de visité is a card like this that you can carry around in a small size, so it was thought of as an early business card, something that was easily tradeable, shareable with your friends, easily reproduced, a cheap form of photography.

Well, of course, daguerreotype is rather clumsy to use, so they switch to tintype, which is a similar process, but it has a very flat finish, and it’s portable, seems to be a little more affordable to most everyone.

And one of the things, of course, the young man going off to war for the first time, would leave an image with the family.

But also, he would take an image, whether it was his young wife or whether it was his mother and father and his brothers.

and oftentimes when you visit the battlefields and you visit the little museums adjacent to those battlefields, you forget that they may have trunks full of those images that those soldiers carried with them, with no name, with no photographer, with no location.

It was their connection around that campfire, and at that battlefield to their home.

It’s heartrending to see those things.

And I think that it was the Civil War that really exploded the need to hang on to those precious images and fix that in the American psyche.

Photographers were also documenting a hidden battlefield, the Underground Railroad.

Across America, abolitionists, free persons of color, and those in bondage helped countless brave souls escape slavery in the south.

From their base in Cincinnati, abolitionists Levi and Catherine Coffin assisted over 2,000 freedom seekers.

Each time it was a federal crime.

Those convicted faced a fine of up to $1,000 and six months in jail.

On at least two occasions, abolitionist James Presley Ball, a friend of Levi Coffin, photographed freedom seekers, one attributed to Ball shows Levi and Catherine Coffin, Henry Stores, and nine freedom seekers.

The second photograph records a remarkable story.

This is a small image with a monumental impact.

It’s a carte de visité, so it’s only about 3 1/4 by 2 and 3/4 inches large.

but it features a seated black woman who’s about 18 years of age flanked by two white men who have pistols drawn near her head.

The two men, dressed in civilian clothing, are actually Union soldiers from the 22nd Wisconsin Infantry Regiment.

In September of 1862, their regiment, nicknamed the abolitionist regiment, passed through Cincinnati to battlefields in Kentucky.

The regiment’s first duty was to guard supply lines from encampments near Nicholasville, Kentucky.

While they were there, this young woman whose name we do not know, unfortunately, was sold by her master and heard that he intended to sell her as a prostitute in Lexington, Kentucky.

So, in desperation, she ran to this regiment in Nicholasville and pleaded for assistance.

So Jesse Berch and Frank Rockwell volunteered to drive her 100 miles north to Cincinnati to the home of Levi Coffin, who was known as the President of the Underground Railroad.

The two men accompanied this young woman to the studio of JP Ball, where he photographed her.

This image is extremely rare.

You almost never find photographic evidence of freedom seekers because it was far too dangerous.

So it’s an extremely important image.

During the war, photographers set up field studios near encampments such as Camp Dennison, a sprawling recruitment and training center east of Cincinnati.

Photographers Charles Waldack and Bonsall and Gibson took portraits of some of the 50,000 Union soldiers who trained here for combat.

Photographers followed the troops south.

Cincinnati photographer Isaac Bonsall eventually set up shop in Tennessee.

Nicknamed the fighting Quaker, Bonsall served as the official photographer for the Army of the Cumberland.

He photographed Union camps, soldiers, and battlefields at Murfreesboro and Chattanooga.

His portfolio includes rare photographs of US Colored Troops.

Near the end of the war, the Quartermaster General of the Union Army dispatched photographers to document federal properties.

Preserved in the National Archives, this stunning photographic collection includes 28 prints taken in Cincinnati in July of 1864.

The photographer posed soldiers, staff, and citizens outside each building, Union Army headquarters, barracks, factories, warehouses, stables, and hospitals, all in breathtaking resolution.

Within 10 months, the Civil War ended shortly after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox courthouse.

Sailors and soldiers who survived returned home.

The memory of many who perished were preserved and treasured family photographs.

After the war, Greater Cincinnati joined America’s second industrial revolution.

Commercial photography captured new factories, new transportation networks, and a vibrant cultural scene, including the nation’s first professional baseball team.

Americans collected celebrity carte de visité, and the flourishing fad, stereographs.

John Wildman Winder documented the completion of an engineering wonder, the Covington and Cincinnati Suspension Bridge.

Winder captured the full spectacle surrounding this landmark achievement.

When opened, the bridge finally connected Southern Ohio and Northern Kentucky.

In the summer of 1866, Charles Waldack took photography into a whole new realm.

Charles was a Belgian.

He grew up in Ghent and learned photography before he emigrated to the US in 1855.

Once there, he ended up in Cincinnati and opened a photographic studio, and generally excelled in anything he touched.

Charles Waldack operated one of the top photographic studios in Cincinnati from 1857 to 1882.

He earned international recognition for his photography and books.

In 1866, Waldack was approached by John Proctor and John O’Shaughnessy.

The two men wanted to promote tourism at Mammoth Cave in Kentucky using photography.

They did have one major problem.

They knew absolutely nothing about how to take a photograph.

So the natural thing to do was to go to the local photographic chemist Charles Waldack.

Waldack had exceptional technical skills, but no one before had attempted to extensively photograph a cave system.

Fortunately, a new American factory was selling magnesium, a metal that burns with a brilliant light.

To be able to burn it, you made what was called a taper.

This is an example, modern one that has been made up.

So this is three strands of magnesium ribbon, twisted together.

And this is very similar to the tapers that would have been made and supplied to Waldack, but at the start of the expedition, one of these tapers, a single one, was costing about $6.50 and he had 200 of these for his first expedition.

By the end of the whole project, he said he’d spent $500.

about $10,000 today.

Armed with magnesium tapers, Waldack, Proctor and O’Shaughnessy traveled to Mammoth Cave for a trial expedition in June.

They hired veteran cave guides, but Waldack soon discovered the enormous difficulties of making wet plate photographs deep inside a cavern.

The team had the transport equipment through tight rocky passages.

Humidity warped their stereoscopic camera.

Dust ruined collodion plates, and they had to burn dozens of magnesium tapers, hung in reflectors just to get a single photograph.

Waldack, very early on had found that, oh, if you burn a lot of magnesium, the smoke just rose in the air and filled any space that he was in.

If he took too long on taking a picture, there was nothing to take a picture of.

It was just clouds of smoke.

During the first expedition, Waldack produced eight photographs that he deemed acceptable.

They were the first photographs ever made inside a cave in America.

We think that if Daguerre and Niepce were here, they would weep.

These pictures now lie before us and are the most wonderful ones we have ever seen.

It hardly seems possible.

Daguerre never dreamed of it.

Five years ago we would have laughed at it, and today we can scarcely believe what we see.

If Mr. Waldack modestly considers these mere experiments, we have much hope for the next trials.

That summer, the photography team returned to Mammoth Cave for three months.

The first expedition was to find out whether such photography was even possible.

And the second expedition, when he really went all out, he knew it was possible, so he was after the results.

The results were spectacular.

Waldack produced over 48 photographs using magnesium light, a small crew, and a large amount of determination.

One of Waldack's original glass plate photographs has survived.

Over 40 were printed for a popular stereographic series, Magnesium Light Views in Mammoth Cave.

The series generated revenue for the next six years.

Again, in context, nobody had seen an image of a cave, and Waldack was just supreme on how he found a problem and the way around it.

These pictures didn’t just arise by chance.

He was always looking for solutions on how to get a better picture, not just a picture.

Waldack was a true innovator.

He was experimenting and he was coming up with the results big time.

In 1869, photography came full circle in Greater Cincinnati.

30 years after Dr. John Locke created his sun pictures, the Cincinnati Observatory launched an expedition to photograph a total solar eclipse.

Cleveland Abbe, director of the observatory, led a team of scientists west to a location along the path of totality.

They set up camp at Fort Dakota, a US Army outpost near present day Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

The team included photographer W.C. Taylor, who would capture the eclipse through a three inch refracting telescope.

Cleveland Abbe was really motivated to, you know, form an expedition and document this eclipse, much like other astronomers at that time, especially with the new advancements in science and instruments.

Cleveland garnered a bunch of colleagues and others, and each one of them had a role.

One was meteorology, one was just observational viewing of the weather.

Some were just testing things like barometric pressure checking the telescope.

Obviously, Taylor was handling the photographs.

And all of them were just the kind of the thrill of chasing an eclipse that excitement of seeing something that most people don’t get to see in their lifetime.

On the day of the eclipse, so that was August 7, 1869, the clouds kept moving and they weren’t really sure if it was gonna happen, and right before the eclipse begins, a whole roll of clouds roll through.

Yet just as the moon began to block the sun, the skies cleared.

Taylor was able to take 24 photographs documenting a total solar eclipse.

You know, we look at photography today and they look rudimentary, but at in 1869, that was pretty phenomenal.

It was really a national phenomenon.

People knew it was gonna happen, and they were very excited to see these pictures when they came out.

Thanks to scholars and curators, Greater Cincinnati’s photographs are being preserved.

Each day, they research, catalog, conserve and scan some of the millions of images in their photographic collections.

Many institutions are posting digital photographs online.

These searchable catalogs make archival photographs accessible to anyone, anywhere, at any time.

As a result, the region’s visual heritage is being used in hundreds of books, classrooms, and exhibits throughout the world.

But this is the Cincinnati panorama of 1848.

We know exactly when it was taken, not through the notes left behind because those were lost.

What’s so important for students to see the original, because they can also see the quality of light, the way that it plays across the surface, and that to see a daguerreotype clearly have to be at a particular angle.

So, there’s just no comparison to seeing it in a book.

Someone once said a picture equals a thousand words.

Well, this does.

I’ve watched people enamored with this.

We’ve been trying to tell the stories we’re pulling out of this photograph for 15 years now, and I feel that we’re just now tapping the surface.

They’re just a true treasure that I think um is important for any researcher to be able to see, access, and to help interpret their viewpoints of, again, a snapshot frozen in time.

There are so many things in history which we just read about without having any visual context to look at.

Having that context, we can imagine ourselves in that position or in that place, and, it makes it more real.

But it is that capacity of photography to, almost without intention, capture these incredibly important human moments and speak in a way that really no other art form does.

We’ve built villages and towns, and we’ve supported all sorts of things for generations, and it’s handing that forward.

That’s what’s important, I think, in these images, handing that forward.

Greater Cincinnati served as a major center for the development of American photography during its first three decades of existence.

Innovative scientists, artists, and entrepreneurs created a rich photographic heritage.

a magnificent visual record that documents our region’s history, reveals our humanity, and retains our collective memory for future generations.

More information about this program, including educational materials, is available on Voyageur's companion website.