Platt D. Babbitt
[Niagara Falls]

ArtistAmerican, 1823–1879
CultureAmerican
Titles
  • [Niagara Falls]
Datec. 1855
Place depictedNiagara Falls, New York, United States
MediumDaguerreotype in leather case
DimensionsImage: 6 × 8 in. (15.2 × 20.3 cm)
Overall (closed case): 7 1/16 × 9 1/16 × 11/16 in. (18 × 23 × 1.8 cm)
Credit LineMuseum purchase funded by the S. I. and Susie Morris Photography Endowment and Alexander K. McLanahan
Object number2017.122
Not on view

Explore Further

Department
Photography
Object Type
Description

In 1853, long before it became commonplace for tourists to
make snapshots of one another standing in front of Saint Peter’s, the Eiffel Tower,
or the Parthenon, Platt Babbitt set up business in an open-air pavilion at the prime
viewing point on the American side of Niagara Falls (now called Prospect
Point). His impressive daguerreotypes—magically precise one-of-a-kind
photographic images on silver-plated sheets of copper—allowed visitors to take
home not only a view of the spectacular falls and a memory of the misty air and
roaring sound, but also the undeniable proof that they had stood at its very
edge.



Provenance[Charles Isaacs Photographs, Inc., New York]; purchased by MFAH, 2017.
Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks
[no inscriptions]

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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