Daguerreotypes. New York c1850. A series of found photos brought alive in a media archaeology.

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Analogue meets digital.

An Archaeography project.

For some time I have been developing ideas about media archaeologyMedia. There's a lot about this in my blog, a good deal also in my writing on archaeology and photography.

Media archaeology. Tracking the traces and remains of media, old and new. There are archaeological matters at the heart of all media, involving questions like:

• what, archaeologically, happens and has happened to the technology, apparatuses, instruments and products of media?
• how does the material and archaeological aspect of a medium affect its operation?
• how does the archaeological and material aspect of media help us understand them in new ways?

Summer 2004 I discovered daguerreotypes. The beginnings, almost alchemical, of modern photography. My Metamedia Lab now has a small collection from the height of popularity of the medium in the 1850s.

The Daguerreotype process was made available to the public in 1839. Images are formed in polished light sensitive silver plated on copper. These are not just simply early photographs.They are unique one-off images and positive-negative - you have to catch the mirrored sufrace at the right angle for the very rich image to appear. It is estimated that more than two million Daguerreotypes were produced between 1840 and 1860. Most were posed portraits. Most of the names of the people in the Daguerreotypes that survive have been forgotten.

But Daguerreotypes are delicate, scratch easily, and fade. Our collection is of flawed daguerreotypes. I was drawn to those that are damaged, discarded, neglected. All have lost their protective cases. Many appear blank at first glance. These degraded images are hard to find, even on eBay - no one wants them.

I couldn't at first capture the images with any camera or lighting technique. But then I discovered that my scanner not only did what the camera couldn't, but also picked up what you couldn't or could hardly see by just looking at the plate. If you got the settings right.

The images in the mirrored surface come alive again, portraits regenerated.

As Fred Turner says - they now seem so close to being alive. These are uncanny images. They run quite counter to that notion that early portraiture was wooden and dead because you had to sit for a long camera exposure.