The Petőfi daguerreotype is the only surviving daguerreotype photograph of Sándor Petőfi, and thus one of the especially important relics of Hungarian history.
According to our current knowledge, the daguerreotype may have been made in the summer of 1845 by Gábor Egressy, an actor and amateur daguerreotypist. Its size is non-standard, 64 × 84 mm, between the “sixth-plate” and “eighth-plate” sizes. Its silver-plated copper plate bears the plate-maker’s hallmark “G.R.B” and the number 40, indicating the silver content (which shows that silver makes up 1/40th of the total weight of the silver-plated copper plate). In the roughly 173 years since it was made, the picture, which has had a chequered history, has suffered a great deal of damage. In the intervening time several people have attempted to reproduce the image, and in 1955 Károly Escher also restored it. It is currently in the care of the photographic collection of the Petőfi Literary Museum; its condition is preserved by a conservation package, made by József Ormos and a colleague in the style of Hungarian daguerreotype packages of the period.
On the left of the image comparison: the best digital image so far (source: Wikipedia); on the right: the reproduction made with the Phase One camera system
As is characteristic of the technique, the daguerreotype – made on a silver-plated copper plate coated with a light-sensitive compound, iodine-bromine, with the help of mercury vapour – shows its subject laterally reversed. The exposure time of the photograph (considering the technological possibilities of the time) may have been about 10–60 seconds.
The daguerreotype is particularly sensitive to physical impacts: touching or wiping can destroy the image, and the layer can begin to detach at the edges of the plate. In addition to the physical impact arising from moving the image and from improper storage, it is especially sensitive to sulphur and other pollutants in the air, under whose influence silver oxide or silver sulphide precipitation takes place. The consequence of the chemical processes taking place under the influence of the air is the slow, continuous darkening of the image and, in critical cases, its complete disappearance. For this reason, storage in an airtight, acid-free environment is especially important for daguerreotypes.
It is advisable to copy the Petőfi daguerreotype continuously with the most up-to-date technique available. Since changes in its density cannot yet be controlled, the densitometer is not a suitable instrument for this technique, whereas the cyanide cleaning, which may have been applied to it more than once (on top of the damage it originally caused), can be a source of a further process of deterioration. The aim of using newer photographic methods may be to improve the signal-to-noise ratio in the reproduction, so that more of Petőfi and less of the external mechanical damage, scratches and various kinds of chemical damage can be seen.
In January 2018, in the digitisation photo studio of the Petőfi Literary Museum, the business unit of Tripont responsible for cultural heritage digitisation made an attempt to capture the Petőfi daguerreotype with a Phase One XF IQ280 camera system. The result speaks for itself. In this way, the most detailed image ever made – the one that best reveals the details of the original photograph – could be produced.
Further details can be found here:
Video: Petőfi’s daguerreotype (Petőfi dagerrotípiája), 20 January 2018. The audio recording of the lecture turned into a video, 70 minutes. Lecturer: Géza Szentmártoni Szabó, literary historian. Guest: Bálint Flesch, photographer and photographic conservator
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