Photography in the United States
In spring 1839, the daguerreotype was introduced into the United States by an Englishman named D.W. Seager, who took the first photograph of a view of St. Paul’s Church and a corner of the Astor House in Lower Manhattan in New York City. Painter and inventor Samuel Finley Breese Morse had met Louis Daguerre in Paris in the spring of 1839, becoming the first American to see his photographic process and becoming enamored with it as a result. When he returned to the United States later that year, he enthusiastically promoted the daguerreotype while hailing Seager's prototypical image. Morse had painted "The Gallery of the Louvre" in 1833, and the appeal of the medium of the daguerreotype was an obvious one to him: it was a means of making faithful copies of artworks, in addition to anything else that would be still in front of the slow eye of the camera.
Pierre-Gustave Joly de Lotbinière
In 1839, Joly was in Paris at the time when Louis Daguerre unveiled his early photographic process to the scientific world. Embarking on a trip to the Middle East, Pierre-Gustave acquired one of the first daguerreotype cameras from Noël Paymal Lerebours in order to make photographic records of the ancient monuments he was about to see on his journey. He travelled via Malta to Greece, where he visited Athens and other places, and then carried on to Alexandria. There, he met the painter Horace Vernet and his nephew, Frédéric Goupil-Fesquet, who were also carrying daguerreotype equipment. The three men undertook some excursions in Egypt together before parting company. Joli then travelled to the Holy Land, Syria and Turkey. Back in Paris, five of his 92 plates were published by Lerebours in his book "Excursions daguerriennes" (1840–41), others by architect Hector Horeau for his book "Panorama from Egypt and Nubia" (1841). Due to technological restrictions, the daguerretypes themselves could not be reproduced and, instead, were copied as engravings which could then be printed. None of Joly's original plates has been identified, and they may well be lost. What they contained is known through his diary which has been published in 2011.