Daguerreotype Portrait: Two Women in Bakelite Decorative Case

• Bakelite - Bakelite was the first completely synthetic man-made substance. Bakelite was invented in 1909 by an independent New York chemist Leo H. Baekeland. It was called the "material of a thousand uses" and used to make everything from car parts to jewellery.
  
  Although nearly all plastic from this period is known as ?Bakelite', it is important to remember that this is an umbrella term that covers many different early plastics such as Lucite and cellulose acetate, and includes Bakelite.
  
  We often think of the colour of Bakelite items as dark brown, but it was manufactured in various colours including yellow, butterscotch, red, green and brown.
  
  Bakelite could also be transparent, or marbleised by mixing two colours. Plastics were cheap to produce and could be moulded or carved in a huge variety of ways.
  
  Bakelite is most commonly associated with radio cases of the 1930s, telephones and kitchen utensils, but it was also used extensively in jewellery manufacture.
  
  Early designs from the 1920s were plainer and simpler than later examples. Geometric and floral patterns typical of Art Deco styling were popular.
  
  During its heyday in the 1930s, Bakelite jewellery was stocked by the most prestigious stores, such as Saks, Harrods and Macy?s, who dedicated a shop window display to it in 1935.
  
  Coco Chanel featured Bakelite items in her accessories collection and the material was praised frequently in Vogue magazine.
  
  Manufacture of some consumer Items were suspended in 1942 in order to concentrate manufacturing on the war effort.
  
  Small items made of Bakelite are now valuable collectables. Andy Warhol was an avid collector, and when he died in 1987, his pieces sold for record prices at Sotheby's.
• Daguerreotype - The first photographic image was achieved in 1814 by Frenchman Joseph Niepce, with first photographic with the camera obscura, an optical device that projects an image onto a screen. However, the image required eight hours of light exposure and later faded.
  
  Joseph Niepce continued working on improving his invention Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, an artist. Niepce died in 1833, but Daguerre carried on, and at a meeting of the French Academy of Sciences in Paris on August 19, 1839 announced he had discovered a new method of photography, the daguerreotype which he named after himself. The daguerreotype process reduced the exposure time from 8 hours to 3 - 15 minutes.
  
  In major cities, professional photographers of the time, known as daguerreotypists, invited celebrities and political figures to their studios, hoping that by displaying a selection of portraits in their windows, the public would be encouraged to be photographed.
  
  However the popularity of the daguerreotype was short-lived, and its use declined in the late 1850s when the ambrotype, a faster and less expensive photographic process, became available. However the ambrotype still required the services of a professional photographer and it was not until the invention of Kodak's Box Brownie in 1900 that the public were able to shoot their own photographs.
  
  Due to the short time (20 years) that the daguerreotype was popular, and the fact that the image was produced directly onto the plate, meaning there were no negatives, original daguerreotypes are scarce. Most daguerreotypes are portraits, with landscapes and street scenes being less less common.

This item has been included into following indexes:

• photographs, subject - general themes 1,285