HEY, WANNA BUY SOME PIX? Hollywood celebrities were cropping up so often on TV talk shows last week that you would have thought it was Oscar time.
They were grieved, of course, over the tragic death of Princess Diana. But they were also eager to gripe about the paparazzi, whose aggressive tactics may have played a role in her death. Daguerreotype. Daguerreotype of Louis Daguerre in 1844 by Jean-Baptiste Sabatier-Blot The daguerreotype /dəˈɡɛrɵtaɪp/ (French: daguerréotype) process (also called daguerreotypy), introduced in 1839, was the first publicly announced photographic process and the first to come into widespread use.
By the early 1860s, later processes which were less costly and produced more easily viewed images with shorter exposure times had almost entirely replaced it. A small-scale revival of daguerreotypy among photographers interested in historical processes was increasingly evident in the 1980s and 1990s and has persisted into the 2010s. Photo Myth Study: The Art of Stealing Souls. The religious belief that a photograph can steal a soul, imprisoning it within its amalgam of polyester, celluloid, salts and gelatin (or perhaps a CCD if you are into digital photography) is still shared by many cultures across the globe. From Native Americans to the Aborigines of Australia, there are those who refuse to be photographed. This belief evolved in different ways for many cultures, occasionally revolving around the beliefs in the power of mirrors. In folklore, mirrors have the power to steal souls. The superstition of breaking a mirror and causing bad luck stems from the belief that a mirror contains the soul and breaking it causes damage to the soul.