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.
Paper texture effects in calotype photography
Practical photography plausibly dates from the announcement of the Daguerreotype in 1839. This stimulated work by others: in 1840, the Englishman Talbot discovered what he called the calotype process for making photographic negatives on writing paper with the relatively short exposure time of a few minutes for subjects in bright sunlight. A positive print could subsequently be made by pressing a negative under glass against another piece of sensitive paper and exposing it to sunlight. For this, negatives were waxed to make them more transparent. Since many prints could be made from a single negative, travel photography became possible, and prints from calotypes were soon distributed in book form and sold in shops. The chemical operations used to make a calotype were not difficult to perform, and relatively few specialized supplies were required. But the process had a serious deficiency, and it was quickly replaced by photography on glass when this became practical.