The J. Paul Getty Museum

Object Description

It would not have been an easy feat to capture this man's spontaneous charm, given the long exposure times of early photography. He wears casual clothing: a union suit and an open-necked shirt with a lightweight jacket. He strikes a pose like a boxer, fists upraised and clenched. His open grin, however, disarms the gesture, creating a lively portrait of an individual whose name and life-story have been lost to history.

More remarkable, perhaps, this free man of color was photographed three years before the Emancipation Proclamation granted African Americans their freedom.

Unlike the daguerreoptype that is on metal, the ambrotype is an underexposed collodion-on-glass negative that appears positive in reflected light if the back of the glass is coated with black lacquer. Made in the same standard sizes and housed in the same cases as daguerreotypes, ambrotypes were faster to make and required less costly raw materials. They began to displace Daguerre's process for most studio portraiture after 1854, when a specific practical variant of the ambrotype process was patented in the United States and England by James Ambrose Cutting.