There they learned of a collector named Bill Flaherty, who had an early Florida daguerreotype. The Langleys were attending a historical society meeting in Rochester, home of Eastman Kodak and the George Eastman House. Langley dates the picture "around 1850."Īnother picture of Key West, also found in Rochester by Langley and his wife, Joan, was taken about the same time. A year later it was bought by the Florida State Library for $18,500. Wright Langley, author, historian, preservationist, publisher and all-around authority on Key West history, located the photo in the hands of a collector in Rochester, N.Y., in 1997. Paul's Episcopal Church appear in the black-and-white picture. The oldest photograph in the files of the Florida State Archives is a high-angle view of downtown Key West, probably shot from a tower in the area of Front and Simonton Streets. They also preserved the look of America, its houses, buildings and street scenes. In return, they gave America a valuable photographic record of the country, including images of Florida's first governor, Andrew Jackson, President Abraham Lincoln and author Edgar Allan Poe. The dag'typists, the most famous of whom was Mathew Brady, were well paid, earning as much as $100 a day, good money in pre-Civil War days. These itinerant photographers advertised in newspapers and also passed out handbills in small towns. Other early photographers rented space in stores.
Some of them worked from horse-drawn vans fitted out as miniature studios.
A writer in an 1854 issue of Putnam's Monthly Magazine described the dag'typist as a fortune hunter: "I guessed at once that he was a daguerreotype artist, materially aided in this sagacious conjecture by the appearance of a tripod, which lay helplessly on the roof of the coach, its legs tied together and sticking out of the canvas bag in which its head works were bundled up."ĭag'typists traveled with camera, tripod, treated metal plates and chemicals, including compounds of mercury and silver.
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