Daguerreotypes

Thursday evening I went to a talk by Daguerreotype photographer Jerry Spagnoli. One of the stories he told had a baseball connection.

He once found himself in a library in San Francisco waiting for a friend who was trying to locate a book, and he decided to kill some time by looking up “Daguerreotypes” in the card catalog. To his surprise, a large set of cards all pointed to “Baseball Daguerreotypes from the 1920s.” Double weird. This particular kind of photography typically requires long exposures, which makes it unsuitable for sports. And by the 1920s few photographers were still using the Daguerreotype process.

When he investigated, he found something interesting. The books had nothing to do with photography. Instead, they were extensive collections of player and game statistics. The name was intended to imply a high devotion to accuracy, associating the stats with a photography method famous for its faithful reproduction of reality.