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.
James Ambrose Cutting
When dry, the glass plate was then backed either with black paint, metal, cloth, or paper; this black backing made light areas of the negative appear darker, turning the negative image into a positive. Some ambrotypes were made with ruby or dark green glass to simulate the effect of a backing without using one. Ambrotypes often were hand-colored, most commonly with dabs of red paint on the cheeks of the sitter. They were housed in wood or thermoplastic cases (also called 'Union cases'), like the daguerreotype photographs with which they are often confused; an ambrotype is easily distinguished from a daguerreotype because its surface is not reflective, as daguerreotype surfaces are. Ambrotypes were most popular during the mid- to late-1850s but continued to be available through the 1890s.