The photographer’s eye

Images captured by early commercial photographers like the Davis Brothers and Lafayette Newell show both the beauty and destruction of the 1886 ice storm. Many are collected in the archives of the Portsmouth Athenaeum. They also show us how little Portsmouth has changed in nearly 125 years. Victorian views of Richards Avenue, Middle and Pleasant streets and Market Square are easy to identify, even in photographs dominated by white snow. Such images, printed from glass plate negatives, offer astonishing detail.

So it was, ultimately, the advancing technology of photography that allows us to compare our energy-dependant era to our own Victorian past. Curiously, Portsmouth was among the first cities to experiment with the photographic craze. In February 1840, just one year after the photographic process was revealed in France, a "sketch" of the Universalist Church in Portsmouth was created "merely by the operation of rays of light." The photo, now lost, was among the first taken in the United States, and the church, formerly on Pleasant Street, no longer stands.

Although the editor of the Portsmouth Journal at first thought the French photographic process was a hoax, a local experiment changed his mind. Portsmouth painter Samuel P. Long demonstrated the "daguerreotype" process for the public at his studio in the Portsmouth Academy (now the Discover Portsmouth Center) on March 12, 1840. The image of the church taken from Auburn Street, although the building was only an inch wide in the photo, stunned Portsmouth residents.

And in that very first photograph, was the first recorded image of a humble Portsmouth tree. "An intervening elm tree with all its naked limbs and most minute twigs is perfectly delineated," the Journal reported. Photography, the newspaper announced with excitement, is the "greatest discovery of the age".

Portsmouth photographers like the Davis Brothers who followed have left us an astonishing record of a growing city – through good weather and bad – by which we can measure our own lives.

© 2009 by J. Dennis Robinson on SeacaostNH.com. All rights reserved.