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.
Photography in Denmark
Christian Tuxen Falbe, a Danish marine officer, was in Paris in January 1839 on behalf of Crown Prince Frederik when Louis Daguerre revealed the art of daguerreotyping. Falbe informed the Crown Prince of a visit to Daguerre where he had seen some of the very earliest daguerreotypes, explaining how impressed he had been by the new process and how important he thought it would be for art and science in Denmark. Shortly afterwards, he returned to Copenhagen with a camera and a couple of his own daguerreotypes for the Crown Prince who, believing them to be of scientific importance, deposited them with Hans Christian Ørsted, one of Denmark's most prominent scientists. As a result of Ørsted's own interest in photography, the new art took on rapidly: the daguerreotypist Mads Alstrup (1809–76) opened Copenhagen's first photographic studio in 1842; and by 1850 there were over a hundred studios in Copenhagen and many more in the provinces.