(Thought to be Marcus Aurelius Root)

The Daguerreotype was the first publicly available photographic  process, and for nearly twenty years it was the one most commonly used.

Invented by Louis -Jacques-Mande-Daguerre and introduced worldwide in 1839, the daguerreotype was almost completely superseded by 1860 with new, less expensive processes yielding more readily viewable images. Around the turn of the 20th century there was a revival and then again during the past few decades, there has been another  small revival of the daguerreotype among photographers interested in making artistic use of this  early photographic processes.