[Students from the Emerson School for Girls]

Photography Studio Southworth and Hawes American
 Albert Sands Southworth American
 Josiah Johnson Hawes American

Not on view

This first photographic process invented by Louis Daguerre (1787-1851) spread rapidly around the world after its presentation to the public in Paris in 1839. Exposed in a camera obscura and developed in mercury vapors, each highly polished silvered copper plate is a unique photograph that, viewed in proper light, exhibits extraordinary detail and three-dimensionality.
The Boston partnership of Southworth and Hawes produced the finest portrait daguerreotypes in America for leading political, intellectual, and artistic figures. While at first glance, this group portrait of twenty-five unidentified young women may appear to be a haphazard confluence of bodies, the composition is carefully orchestrated as a series of diagonals and pyramids, as in the truncated pyramid formed by the eighteen seated and standing figures on the right-hand side of the picture.

[Students from the Emerson School for Girls], Southworth and Hawes (American, active 1843–1863), Daguerreotype

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