Item Detail
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18437
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1
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2
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English
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A Superlative Image : An Original Daguerreotype of Brigham Young
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BYU Studies
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2005
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44
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no.2
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96-102
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In December 2004, an original daguerreotype of Brigham Young from the 1850's was donated to Brigham Young University. Because the original daguerreotype was long thought to be lost, LDS Church archivists and Holzapfel were both delighted to discover its existence. A daguerreotype is an image captured through a thin film of metal and a camera. Accurate and comparatively inexpensive, the daguerreotype was invented in Europe in 1839 and soon became very popular in America. Daguerreotype photographers were not very common in the Western United States, but one daguerreotype photographer named Lucian Foster made his way to Nauvoo in the 1840's. Foster photographed the temple and a number of Saints. In 1850, another daguerreotype artist named Marsena Cannon came to Salt Lake City. Brigham Young posed twice for Cannon. Two daguerreotypes have survived from Brigham Young's second sitting. One was donated to the United States by the J. Willard Marriott Jr. Charitable Annuity Trust and is housed in the National Portrait gallery in Washington, D.C. The second was donated to BYU by Mark and Suzanne Richards and is housed in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections of the Harold B. Lee Library. This second daguerreotype was long in the possession of one of Brigham Young's daughters, Clarissa Young Spencer. She gave it, along with a few other items, to Preston Nibley in the 1930's as he worked on a biography of Brigham Young. These treasures remained with the Nibleys until his widow's death in 1980, when it was passed to her grandson, Mark Richards. Holzapfel and Wells hope that the media attention this photograph has received will inspire others to donate historical artifacts in their possession.