Daguerreotype View of Cincinnati

Fontayne and Porter

This 120° panoramic image of the Cincinnati riverfront, properly titled Daguerreotype View of Cincinnati. Taken from Newport, Ky, was reassembled from a later series of 8 × 10 film negatives.¹ The original panorama consisted of eight full-plate (6.5 × 8.5") daguerreotypes and was taken in September 1848 by Porter and Fontayne (although most likely just by Porter). It shows a two mile stretch of the Cincinnati riverfront, from the Public Landing to the town of Fulton.

Of the 60 or so boats pictured, 17 can be identified by name.² Among its other details (from left to right) are the office of the composer Stephen Foster, a shipping clerk at the time, the twin-towered Christ Church, the Botanico Medical College, the home of Jacob Strader, president of the Little Miami Railroad, St. Philomena’s Church, and the Mt. Adams Observatory. It is the first complete image of the Cincinnati riverfront, then the sixth largest city and the largest inland port in the US. More importantly, it is the first known image of inland steamboats and of a railroad terminal. It is also one of the earliest known images of freed blacks.

Here are cropped, but otherwise un-retouched scans of the film negatives:

Plate 1: Western Public Landing, Griffin Street

Plate 2: Public Landing. Second Presbyterian Church clock tower (c)³. Cassilly’s row (r, fg)

Plate 3: Botanico-Medical College (AKA Mrs. Francis Trollope’s Bazaar) (r of c) Christ Church (directly r)

Detail, Plate 3

Plate 4: Lawrence Street (c). The Lytle House (directly l)

Plate 5: St. Philomena’s Church (l)

Plate 6: Kilgore House (c, l of bridge). Observatory (c. r of bridge)

Plate 7: Little Miami Railroad depot (l)

Plate 8: Towns of Fulton (c, l) and Columbia (r)

Charles H. Fontayne (1814–1901) and William Southgate Porter (1822–1889) were daguerreians with a studio in the Franklin Buildings in Baltimore around 1844–1845. Fontayne left to start a studio in Cincinnati and Porter became sole owner of the Baltimore Gallery on 20 May 1846. Porter experimented with panoramic images and, on 22 May 1848, he produced a seven panel daguerreotype of the Fairmount Water Works in Philadelphia. This panorama is now in possession of the Eastman House. Although there is little in the way of online images, I can tell you that it is not nearly as impressive as the Cincinnati panorama.

Porter soon rejoined Fontayne at his 30 West Fourth Street studio in Cincinnati and in September 1848 they set up their camera on a rooftop in Newport, Kentucky and took this image.³ Their panorama was immediately recognized as a landmark daguerreotype. In 1849 it won first prize at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and at the Maryland Institutes’ Exhibition of the Mechanical and Fine Art as well as a prize at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London in 1851.

Fontayne and Porters partnership dissolved sometime around 1854–1855. In 1855 Fontayne was advertising life-size photographs at a new gallery in Cincinnati. In 1856 he moved to Cleveland and assisted James F. Ryder in making “solar enlargements.” He later invented a high-speed photo printer⁴ and in 1858 moved to New York City but within the year was back in Cincinnati. Finally, in 1891, he is listed as residing in Passaic, New Jersey. Porter, on the other hand, mostly stayed put. He continued to maintain his studio and gallery in Cincinnati, at various addresses, until 1880, when he moved his studio across the river to Covington, Kentucky:

The panorama, by obscure provence, ended up in the Rare Book and Special Collections Department of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. The plates, still in their original matte and frame, were stored away for years. Although the Library allowed them to be professionally photographed several times they largely remained out of general view - too fragile for public display.

In 2007 the Library sent the plates to the George Eastman House for restoration but there was not much conservators could do other then halting further deterioration by sealing them in argon. Instead they created high-res digital scans using a 16× stereo microscope. Researchers at the University of Rochester then developed several novel image analysis techniques to digitally restore the image:⁶

Unrestored micrographic scan of plate 4. Courtesy PLCHC

To capture all of the detail present in the original image the conservators had to scan each plate at the equivalent of 144,000 MP:

Nearly terminal detail from pl. 4. Courtesy PLCHC

1. The 8 × 10 film negatives, possibly copies of the set taken by the Langley Photo Co. in the 1940s, were scanned and painstakingly reassembled in Photoshop by my Dad, the master photography historian. It should be noted that he prepared these to look good when printed in B&W, hence the contrastiness.

2. They are (l→r) the Lancaster, the Wave, the Colorado, the Highland Mary No. 2, the Doctor Franklin No. 2, the Gen. Worth, the Embassy, the Car of Commerce, the Daily Line, the Brooklyn, the Orleans, the John Hancock, the Meteor, the Ohio Belle, the Palestine, the Cincinnatus, and the New England.

3. Based on the boats and buildings, the low water level, the foliage, the shadows, as well as the apparent inactivity on the riverfront, and corroborated by historical boat manifests and construction records, water level data and local weather reports, Carl Vitz and Capt. Frederick Way suggest that the panorama was taken in the early afternoon of Sunday, 24 Sept 1848 from York Street in Newport. See: Vitz, Carl. “A Cincinnati Daguerreotype.” Address to the Cincinnati Literary Club, 20 Oct 1947 (available in it’s manual typewritten glory here).

The clock tower of the Second Presbyterian Church, less than 1 mm dia. on the original plate, and which had so mocked Vitz and Way, was finally legible after the Eastman/Rochester restoration: it read 1:55 pm:

4. US patent 25,540. Photographic Printing-Machine. Charles Fontayne. 20 September 1859.

5. For more information see the PLCHC site. The Library plans to to place high-res zoomable images of the plates on their site. . The PLCHC also maintains an exhaustive online collection of inland riverboat images.

6. The Eastman scan of plate 4 is available as a dataset from Ross Messing’s University of Rochester CompSci site. Fair warning: the entire image is more than 4 GB! For more information about the restoration see: Tang, X., Ardis, P.A., et. al. “Digital Analysis and Restoration of Daguerreotypes” 2010. Proceedings of the SPIE. Which is online as a PDF.

19 Dec 2008, updated 2 Aug 2010 ‧ Photography