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.
John Jabez Edwin Mayall
Six nations: the United States, England, France, Italy, Germany and Austria exhibited 700 daguerrotypes in a special section of the Great Exhibition devoted to Daguerreotypes and Calotypes. It is considered the first international photography competition. Mayall exhibited 72 daguerreotypes in the photographic section and he received an Honourable Mention in the jury's official report on the photographic exhibits. Three of the five medals awarded to daguerreotypes went to the Americans Mathew Brady, Martin M. Lawrence and John Adams Whipple.