Let me tell you a Secret from the Dark Chamber.

Its about Susan Helen DeKroyft, a famous writer of her day. In an 1845 daguerreotype she is pictured holding up her left hand, thumb folded across the palm, underscoring the two wedding rings she is wearing. She is telling you a secret across 150 years.

Helen DeKroyft is displaying both her ring and her husband's ring. The story the picture tells—one that her friends and colleagues would have recognized immediately—is a tragic one. Her husband, a successful Boston physician, died on their wedding day and a month later she was struck deaf, mute and blind!

Most of the secrets of this marvelous collection of daguerreotypes on exhibition at the National Museum of American Art (in Secrets of the Dark Chamber: The Art of the American Daguerreotype) are not so well known nor easily decipherable but this only adds to their luster. Some of the images are wonderful because they don't give up secrets easily.

From 145 years ago a Woman Holding a Sealed Letter looks straight into the camera. She is obviously communicating something. She says: this message is for you. Clearly it was a message for a particular person but it is still for you. It is a message from her time to your time.

There are two haunting and moving Post Mortems in which both we and they have to come to terms with the face of death. There is another touching, pastel-tinted image of a Dying Boy with Toys whose timeless look of childish acceptance peers out into the present.

There are serious and comical "occupationals" of workers and their tools; landscapes, town and country views that focus reality on the past; pictures of business, art, railroads and sailing ships that tell us of past prides; and group pictures with silent-screenlike acting expressing some message or sentiment, or just being beautiful.

Mostly there are portraits, alone or with others, adults and children, faces of the great (Frederick A. Douglass, Emily Dickinson, Daniel Webster) and unknown. They are portraits that blend the art of formal portraiture with the vernacular formulas of folk art. The average person and commonplace object are the subjects of most daguerreotypes.

"The secret that American photographers learned in the dark chamber was how to combine the specific moment with a vision of lasting importance," writes Merry Foresta, the museum's senior curator of photography, in the catalogue accompanying the exhibit. "These photographers evolved a pictorial vocabulary for rendering the mundane as heroic."

"The challenge of these pictures for the viewer is that the name of the photographer is usually unknown. In the case of a portrait you don't know who the sitter is or in the case of a landscape where it is," curator Foresta adds in an interview. "You are thrown completely on the picture's reality."

"It's a great experience to discover what you can get from an image, how an image works and what you can connect it to—perhaps something you know about the time it was taken, or the subject itself, or the way a person is dressed or what they are holding in their hands. It prompts wonderful narratives that may or may not be true. In most cases you have no way of knowing. But you can take what you know about your present moment and compare it with the earlier moment."

The invention of the daguerreotype, the first form of photography, was announced in Paris on August 19, 1839. From its beginning in the laboratories of optics and chemistry the daguerreotype was enthusiastically welcomed as art. "Wonderful wonder of wonders!," the New Yorker proclaimed in 1839 in an article on a "New Discovery in the Fine Arts."

People were fond of saying that the daguerreotype was "bred of science but welcomed as art." Not since the Renaissance had art and science come together in such an equal way. The only disappointment was the lack of natural color, a want made up in some cases by tinting.

Secrets of the Dark Chamber provides us the opportunity to reconsider those times and to look at some of the very first photographic images.

"Here we have an original moment, the invention of the photograph," says curator Foresta. "In this show there are a couple daguerreotypes that probably were among the first hundred photographic images made in America. You're holding something that original in your hand. It is an exciting thought."

Daguerreography was a hit in the United States. "Americans and American photographers took to the daguerreotype like no one else," writes John Wood, professor of English and director of the creative writing program at McNeese State University, Louisiana, in another essay in the exhibit catalogue. "It was one of the great crazes of the nineteenth century."

The first portrait studio opened in New York in 1840. Soon daguerrean studios opened in nearly every major city and town and daguerreotypists carried their studios to rural areas in wagons. The names of some of these earliest photographers are well known—Mathew Brady and Jeremiah Gurney and the team of Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes—but most are lost to history.

It was a craze that lasted for two decades. Abraham Lincoln was thirty years old in 1839 when the invention was announced. It would be three years before he married Mary Todd, eight years before he went to Washington to serve one term in the House of Representatives, 21 years before he returned as President of the United States. In that time the era of the daguerreotype came and passed, bowing to cheaper, reproducible paper images and for a while tintypes.

The daguerreotype used a not inexpensive silver-coated plate that produced "unique images of exquisite tonal gradations." The same silver made it highly reflective and difficult to see unless held at the proper angle in the proper light. It had to be carefully sealed to avoid tarnishing. And since each daguerreotype was an original, it couldn't be copied except by making a daguerreotype of a daguerreotype.

Nevertheless, the daguerreotype had what many 19th century commentators called a tinge of the "marvelous" and its precision and capacity for seemingly three-dimensional rendering continued to be celebrated even after its day. Abraham Borgardus, a master of 19th-century American photography, was still writing about the daguerreotype as late as 1904 and lamenting its fate: "I consider the [daguerreotype] the best picture yet made with the camera."

Secrets of the Dark Chamber features 152 outstanding and rarely seen examples of early daguerreotypes, on loan from public and private collections. Putting the exhibit together was a classic detective story—a matter of searching and locating and some surprises.

"I started looking for daguerreotypes in the obvious places—the large collections of historical materials at the George Eastman house in Rochester and the Getty museum in Santa Monica," curator Foresta recounts. "I soon began to realize that most of the daguerreotypes were held in private hands. My search then widened to private collections of daguerreotypes, then to people who collected historical materials on various subjects but not necessarily photography.

"Some collectors had daguerreotypes of landscapes and gold mining scenes, others of African Americans, still others of people holding nineteenth century tools. I was introduced to collections I didn't even know existed. I looked as long as I could and then decided what made sense as a sort of cross-section of American daguerreotyping--the great themes as well as the incredible images." The search led to an unexpected bonus. Curator Foresta came across a major collection of daguerreotypes and photographs from the medium's first century while reviewing daguerreotypes owned by Charles Isaacs, a Philadelphia collector.

The outstanding Isaacs Collection was acquired by the National Museum of American Art early this year. A exhibition is planned in 1996. Meanwhile, six daguerreotypes from the collection have been included in Secrets of the Dark Chamber: The Art of the American Daguerreotype.

"I think Secrets of the Dark Chamber is most significant because it opens the door to a subject and a medium that has not received much attention," Curator Foresta says. "I've seen a lot in my searching but my sense is there is a lot more to be seen.".

"I hope everyone now will be pulling out the drawers where all these wonderful little cases are and that we didn't take much time to look at before. I hope people will start looking at them and realize how remarkable and important they really are."