Extending Forget and Remember, lockets Daguerre and Orpheus form part of a series made as a way to further explore cultural assumptions of digital materialities as we experience them[1].

Daguerre comprises a locket with a small camera in a leather case connected above it. It can hold only one image at a time, taken with its connected camera. A photograph can be taken by removing the lens cap on the camera for a few seconds, and then replacing it again, the image captured is then automatically displayed in the locket. Any amount of photographs can be taken, but as the locket can hold only one image at a time, in doing so the previous image will be deleted from the locket; each new image replaces the last. Daguerre was named after Daguerreotypes; the first permanent commercial photograph made through a process refined by Louis Daguerre (with Joseph Nicéphore Niépce) in 1822[2]. Daguerreotypes were fragile, one off positive-only images on a silvered copper plate that could not be re-printed.

[1] Gegenwart, Beatte and Charlotte Kingston “Momentum”, Craft in the Bay, Swansea. Exhibition catalogue 2011.

[2]Daguerre, Louis Jacques Mandé. An historical and descriptive account of the various processes of the daguerréotype and the diorama. American Photographic Historical Society, 1839.