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.
Abraham Bogardus
Abraham Bogardus (November 29, 1822 – March 22, 1908) was an American Daguerreotypist and photographer who made some 200,000 daguerreotypes during his career. 
He was trained in the Daguerreotype process by New Yorker George W. Prosch, who in 1839 had made a camera for Samuel F.B. Morse. Bogardus opened a studio and gallery at 363 Broadway in New York in 1846, becoming very successful. In 1868, he helped in the founding of the National Photographic Association of which he was President for five years. He worked as a clerk in a dry goods store in the late 1830s, and exhibited a painting at the American Institute in 1845.
From 1847 to 1852, he was listed as a Daguerreotypist at 217 Greenwich Street. His residence was in Newark, N.J. from 1849 to 1851, returning to Grove Street, New York City between 1851 and 1852. His success enabled a branch gallery at 126 Washington Street, Newark, N.J. in 1849, which moved to 8 Clinton Street, Newark, N.J. in 1850. His New York City gallery was moved to 229 Greenwich Street in 1851 and the old Root Gallery at 363 Broadway refitted in 1862. He opened a new studio at 1153 Broadway in 1869, maintaining the 363 Broadway address.