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Contemporary Daguerrotypes / Beniamino Terraneo
With 160 megapixel digital cameras, tiny shoot-anywhere cameras embedded into our smart devices, and the general ubiquity of photography in our everyday, it’s quite a stretch to imagine photography’s origins. Long before compact rangefinders and 35mm film, and even long before Nadir’s popular portraiture and Talbot’s calotype, there was the daguerrotype. The technique was the first able to fix an image to a surface – and was therefore the first successful photographic method.
Today, the technique has long since been virtually abandoned, and there are only a few dozen photographers the world over working in the medium. Beniamino Terraneo is one of the very few who not only work in the medium, but whose work is also of extremely high quality. He has studied the medium extensively, and is today the only photographer in Italy working in daguerrotype.
Tomorrow the artist will show a large selection of his works in an exhibition at entitled “Alle soglie di una nuova modernità” (“On the brink of a new modernity”). For the exhibition, Maestro Terraneo took a spiritual voyage around Italy to find places and objects highly evocative of the time in which Louis Daguerre made his famous “Excursions Daguerriens” – the first ever photo album, and an excellent tribute to the medium’s inherent authenticity.
Daguerrotypes are rare and irreproducible treasures. Since they have no negative, each is a one-of-a-kind imprint etched onto a reflective sheet of silver. Their detail is extraordinary, yet their substance and particular chemical process lend them an otherworldly presence…
Join us tomorrow at JacopoBianco&Nero, 72 Via Solari in Milan, with several examples for sale.
Tag Christof
