bavarikon4UDescription
At first glance, the wooden box camera made by Alphonse Giroux according to Daguerre’s specifications is hardly distinguishable from a camera obscura. To bring the image into focus, a drawer inserted into the front box with the ground-glass screen is moved backwards and forwards on a wooden baseboard and fixed in place; a folding mirror behind the ground-glass screen allows the projected image to be viewed standing upright. To take the photo, the ground-glass frame is replaced with a plate holder with light-sensitive photographic plate. On the lens, the brass bezel acts as an aperture, and a pivoting plate serves as a shutter. Daguerre noted a period of 3 to 30 minutes as the exposure time, depending on the intensity of the light.
To prove the authenticity of the camera, a paper label is attached to the right side in a transverse oval brass frame. The inscription »Aucun Appareil n’est garanti s’il ne porte la Sign.ture/Mr. DAGUERRE et le Cachet de Mr. GIROUX/LE/DAGUERREOTYPE/EXÉCUTÉ/SOUS LA DIRECTION/DE SON AUTEUR./à Paris/chez/Alph. Giroux et Cie, Rue du Coq St. honoré, No. 7.« bears Daguerre’s handwritten signature on the left and a seal by Giroux on the right with the inscription »DAGUERREOTYPE/1839/ALPH./GIROUX.« The handwritten marking »UE« next to the seal, which varies from camera to camera, will have served as a serial mark, as similar markings on other Daguerre cameras suggest.
The Berlin lithographer and art dealer Louis Friedrich Sachse had ordered six cameras from Giroux at a price of 425 francs each as early as July 1839. One of these cameras came into the possession of the Königliches Gewerbeinstitut, the later Technische Hochschule in Berlin, and from there, at the request of the museum’s founder Oskar von Miller, to the Deutsches Museum in 1905. There are only a few cameras left in the world today; the camera in the Deutsches Museum is the only original camera in Germany. (Source: Kemp 2017)
Technical data:
Type: Sliding box camera
memory: daguerreotype
picture format: 216 × 167 mm (= whole plate)
lens: (Charles Chevalier, Paris; achromatic meniscus 1:14/380 mm)