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| Louis Dodero Portrait of Living Man beside Dead Man ca. 1850 daguerreotype Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Anonymous photographer The Greek Slave - marble sculpture by Hiram Powers ca. 1850 daguerreotype Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Anonymous photographer Franz Friedrich and Friend ca. 1840-50 daguerreotype Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Anonymous photographer Henri-Charles Maniglier ca. 1850 daguerreotype Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Félix-Jacques-Antoine Moulin Two Standing Models ca. 1850 daguerreotype Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| attributed to Bruno Braquehais Reclining Model as Danaë ca. 1850-60 daguerreotype (hand-colored) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
from The New Spirit
At this point an event of such glamor and such radiance occurred that you forgot the name all over again. It could be compared to arriving in an unknown city at night, intoxicated by the strange lighting and the ambiguities of the streets. The person sitting next to you turned to you, her voice broke and a kind of golden exuberance flooded over you just as you were lifting your arm to the luggage rack. At once the weight of the other years and above all the weight of distinguishing among them slipped away. You found yourself not wanting to care. Everything was guaranteed, it always had been, there would be no future, no end, no development except this steady wavering like a breeze that gently lifted the tired curtains day had let fall. And all the possibilities of civilization, such as travel, study, gastronomy, sexual fulfillment – these no longer lay around on the cankered earth like reproaches, hideous in their reminder of what never could be, but were possibilities that had always existed, had been created just for both of us to bring us to the summit of the dark way we had been traveling without ever expecting to find it ending. Indeed, without them nothing could have happened. Which is why the intervening space now came to advance toward us separately, a wave of music which we were, unable to grasp it as it unfolded but living it. That space was transfigured as though by hundreds and hundreds of tiny points of light like flares seen from a distance, gradually merging into one wall of even radiance like the sum of all their possible positions, plotted by coordinates, yet open to the movements and suggestions of this new life of action without development, a fixed flame.
– John Ashbery, from Three Poems (Viking Press, 1972)
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| Anonymous photographer Two Young Men in Soft-brimmed Hats ca. 1850-60 daguerreotype Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| W. & F. Langenheim Frederick Langenheim ca. 1848-50 daguerreotype (hand-colored) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Anonymous photographer Strongman with Indian Clubs (stereoscopic image) ca. 1853-60 daguerreotype (hand-colored) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Anonymous photographer Woman in Flowered Bonnet ca. 1850-60 daguerreotype (hand-colored) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
from The System
On this Sunday which is also the last day of January let us pause for a moment to take note of where we are. A new year has just begun and now a new month is coming up, charged with its weight of promise and probably disappointments, standing in the wings like an actor who is conscious of nothing but the anticipated cue, totally absorbed, a pillar of waiting. And now there is no help for it but to be cast adrift in the new month. One is plucked from one month to the next; the year is like a fast-moving Ferris wheel; tomorrow all the riders will be under the sign of February and there is no appeal, one will have to get used to living with its qualities and perhaps one will even adjust to them successfully before the next month arrives with a whole string of new implications in its wake. Just to live this way is impossibly difficult, but the strange thing is that no one seems to notice it; people sail along quite comfortably and actually seem to enjoy the way the year progresses, and they manage to fill its widening space with multiple activities which apparently mean a lot to them. Of course some are sadder than the others but it doesn't seem to be because of the dictatorship of the months and years, and it goes away after a while. But the few who want order in their lives and a sense of growing and progression toward a fixed end suffer terribly.
– John Ashbery, from Three Poems (Viking Press, 1972)
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| Anonymous photographer Metalworker in Apron working with a Vise ca. 1840-60 daguerreotype (hand-colored) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Anonymous photographer Young Woman wearing Collar with Large Bow ca. 1850-60 daguerreotype (hand-colored) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Anonymous photographer Two Young Men ca. 1850 daguerreotype Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Anonymous photographer Theron Curtiss ca. 1840-60 daguerreotype (hand-colored) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |