Old Young photo donated to BYU

Today, daguerreotypes are a curiosity. Invented by Frenchman Louis Daguerre in 1839, they were created by coating one side of a thick copper plate with silver, buffing the silver coating to a mirror finish, sensitizing it to light and exposing it in the camera. The result was like a Polaroid, a unique image that couldn't be reprinted like prints from a negative.

In fact, daguerreotypes were like negatives in one respect; they were reversed, so the daguerreotype of Young shows him with his hair parted on the right instead of the left, as he wore it.

The images were crisp and recorded detail many photographic methods wouldn't match for decades, but daguerreotypes were delicate and had to be kept in glass display cases. Many images were preserved for history only because they were later photographed using newer methods before the originals were lost. With mass printing, many old images are easy to find. A reproduction of the Young daguerreotype was included in both Nibley's book in 1936 and Holzapfel's in 2000.

But to have as an artifact the copper plate bearing Brigham Young's image that was actually in the camera that he sat in front of is very exciting," said Tom Wells, curator of BYU's photographic archives. "As you look at the image and know that Brigham Young also looked at that very same image, it's a rush."

The picture also provides, literally, a different image of Young from the stereotype of him as a stern taskmaster, said John Murphy, another curator at BYU's Harold B. Lee Library and the man who secured the donation from Richards.

"It's an extraordinary image," Murphy said. "It's a young Brigham Young. He's dapper in his suit, handsome. He has a nice little smile on his lips. For the day and time, it's a relaxed image."

The daguerreotypist probably was Marsena Cannon, who ran ads for his business in the Deseret News with the picture of a cannon. The other image he took that day was in a private collection until it was purchased by the Marriott family and donated to the Smithsonian.

The donated image is in excellent condition, much better than the one at the Smithsonian, Holzapfel said, but BYU preservationists are restoring its case.

"We won't do anything with the daguerreotype itself," Wells said. "It's extremely fragile. What we do is preserve it and stabilize it so it doesn't deteriorate."

Wells said BYU won't put the daguerreotype on permanent display for preservation reasons. Instead, it generally will sit in a special vault that controls temperature and other elements that could damage it. However, it might be on display in limited exhibitions, and it will be digitized for people to view on the Internet.

Wells said the donation was "like Christmas" for the library. It's also proof the era of historic finds is not over.

"You literally believe nothing else can be found," Holzapfel said, "and then you get a phone call that someone's aunt has died and something amazing has been found in a trunk in the attic that hadn't been opened for 50 years.

"The fact this daguerreotype is in a repository is even better," he added. "It's much safer there. Private collectors should realize that no matter how much you love it, your kids or grandkids might not love it, or a kid might pick it up and play with it like a toy, or it could be lost in a flood or a fire."

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Contributing: Joe Bauman

E-mail: twalch@desnews.com