The Daguerreotype is something every photography student meets early on, as part of the medium’s origin story. But it’s usually encountered only as myth, a “glow” said to come from an image resting on a mirror polished plate of silver, light seeming to rise from within the warm metal.

The first time I saw one in person at the RISD Museum, it was as mesmerizing as promised. The gap between reproductions and the real object made me obsessed. I wanted to make my own. In the meantime I collected what I could: mostly pieces in less than pristine condition.

As I researched and collected, I noticed how narrow the 19th century record is, most Daguerreotypes picture only a certain European subject. There are exceptions, such as the portrait of Frederick Douglas at the Met, but they are rare. And Carrie Mae Weems’ From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, reframing Louis Agassiz’s 1850 images, shows how, even when non-European subjects appear, the photographs are all too often tragic. Making my own Daguerreotypes, I wanted to find myself, literally and figuratively inside this deathly beautiful medium, one that is rarely practiced now because it’s dangerous and toxic. I turn to friends and loved ones to imagine a different kind of portrait archive.

Daguerreotypes are objects of love. As one-of-one objects that resist mechanical reproducibility, they carry an aura, something that I long for amid A.I. imagery and the onslaught of images. I understood this most clearly through the objects themselves: broken hinges, worn cases, the evidence of someone carrying a portrait and opening it again and again. The wear is love made visible through touch.

For this reason, this body of work, codenamed Love, Love Is A Verb, rests on a simple premise: to make tender, powerful portraits of my friends and loved ones in a medium so beautiful it could be no other. To think about who was denied being pictured with care, and to begin redressing that gap. My Daguerreotypes are typically made as paternal twins, two plates born at the same moment. I ask one question “How do you want to be seen?”, and then give one to someone who deeply loves the sitter (or whom the sitter deeply loves). The other remains with me as its caretaker, until one day it can help widen the story of who is pictured in photography’s first exquisite process.