Photography has become the catalyst for social and cultural memory and a tool for scientific advancement. The world owes a great deal to the early inventors of the latent image for their patience and skill, for without photography one might consider the world an unmemorable place. The first step in photography’s dissemination into the world came by way of a Frenchman named Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. His process known as the daguerreotype's quickly circulated throughout the Western world, and Daguerre, from the day of the daguerreotype announcement in August 1839, became known to the world as the father of photography. Understanding the importance of Daguerre’s process of the daguerreotype requires an analysis with three particular categories; the first being the historical context in which the process was created. Secondly, social and cultural significance of the daguerreotype era plays a vital role in how the process is understood as a photographic object, and how it functioned in the society in which it thrived in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Thirdly, one must examine the process of deterioration and preservation to be aware of the physical nature of the object, and methods of ensuring the longevity of the image. Amalgamating these components will allow for a full analysis of a daguerreotype image and provide a case for the importance of daguerreotype images within photographic collections. Historically, the antecedent to the invention of photography can be traced as far back as the fifth century BC when Mo Ti recorded that “the reflected light rays of an illuminated object passing through a pinhole into a darkened enclosure resulted in an inverted but otherwise exact image of the object.” This concept of using a small aperture to project images resulted in inquisitive experiments through the following centuries until the Renaissance when a device was created that would manage and direct this optical phenomenon. The apparatus was called the camera obscura, literally translated to "dark room" and “is basically a dark chamber, or box, with an opening at one end through which light passes. The light entering the camera obscura falls onto the wall opposite to form an image.” The device became a popular tool for those interested in rendering an exact pictorial representation of physical nature. Algarotti, a writer on art and science in the latter half of the eighteenth century, advocated the use of the camera obscura stating that “Painters should make the same use of the Camera Obscura, which Naturalists and Astronomers make of the microscope and telescope; for all these instruments equally contribute to make known, and represent Nature.” The camera obscura and the science of light rays continued to develop throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as technology advanced. Further developments were made to the camera obscura by adding lenses of different lengths to sharpen and broaden the image. The experiments with light and perception were then coupled with the knowledge of chemical compounds that would later lead to photographic science. In 1725 Johann Heinrich Schulze discovered that “silver nitrate darkened when exposed to sunlight and that this change was the result of exposure to light and not heat.” This discovery is crucial to photography as it forms the basis for the science of the medium. As time progressed, experiments involving silver halides and their reaction with light slowly crept closer to the invention of photography. Particularly, the work of Thomas Wedgwood and Humphry Davy was an immense contribution to photographic science. Wedgwood and Humphry discovered that “it was possible to chemically transfer by means of light,” and had they been able to find a way to arrest the development of the silver salts photography may have been introduced forty years earlier. The stage was set for photography, and successful experiments were recorded during the same time as Daguerre worked on his theory. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, who would become Daguerre’s partner, played a crucial role in the daguerreotype’s development. Without Niépce’s experiments daguerreotypes may not have been on a metal support. Niépce worked with a process he called Heliography, meaning sun-writing. In this process he used bitumen, a material “that hardens and becomes insoluble when exposed to light.” He used glass and pewter coated with bitumen as supports for the transfer of engravings. The engraving would be made translucent with lavender oil or varnish and placed against the bitumen. Placing the sandwich into the sunlight for exposure “the bitumen hardened on the portions not covered by the lines of the print and remained soluble on the rest of the plate; after washing, an image appeared with the bare pewter forming the line.” In 1827 Niépce created his famous positive-negative image from his home in France using a camera obscura with a pewter plate coated w