click! Photography Changes Everything

Anthony Bannon, director of the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, describes how tourists bought early daguerreotypes of their visit to Niagara Falls to commemorate their encounters with the sublime.

Women carrying parasols, men in top hats, and children dressed as if for church seem, in these daguerreotypes, to be standing beneath a proscenium watching the greatest natural drama in young America at the time, Niagara Falls. Icon of the sublime and believed to be a sign of God’s favor for the new nation, this huge cascade was a symbol of power that attracted new streams of eager tourists to Western New York ready for beauty and awe.

Many who stood on the brink of the cataract also came to understand the mighty power of photography, a remarkable process announced in France about a dozen years earlier, a new medium capable of capturing both the eternal forces of nature and the novelty of this new sightseeing destination. Platt D. Babbitt, the hard-scrabble opportunist who made and sold these photographs, understood how they would rekindle visitors’ vivid experiences of the very light reflected from both torrent and tourists, preserved on a magical, and silvered photographic copper plate.

To visit The Falls was a dramatic experience. Plumes of watery mist were visible from afar, before visitors even arrived, rising like smoke from a bomb or some Biblically-scaled event. Tourists gathered on the edge of the American Falls at Prospect Point (formerly called Point View) responded to the sound and sight of a gigantic spill of more than a million gallons of water every second.

Equally dramatic at the time was photography itself, which stole light from the heavens and plucked and preserved significant moments from the previously unstoppable passage of time. Indeed, Niagara itself was ripe for photographic transformation, a place where the sublime could be worshipped through a new medium. If Niagara became one of photography’s first churches, Babbitt was among the first of the celebrants. He strategically located his business under a roofed pagoda that both blocked the view of other photographers and protected his daguerreotype apparatus, a camera fairly primitive by today’s mechanical and optical standards, yet able to collect likenesses whose clarity has not been equaled since.

Babbitt’s camera focused and celebrated the grand vista—big sky, rocks, sprays of mist, and surging water that passed by so quickly as to blur itself into what looked like a shimmering and ethereal sheet. From the place where tourists and photographer stood to witness The Splendor, Niagara was a stage set, a place to contemplate all that was larger than one’s self, including God, Country, and Technology.

Babbitt’s name first appears in regional records in 1850, when he was reported to work on the Canadian side of the Niagara River with Saul Davis, a huckster of prodigious proportion, who would sell anything and also made photographs, while providing lodging and food. By 1853, Babbitt, then thirty years old, had crossed the river and found a more focused partner, Thomas Tugby, whose Mammouth Bazaar sold guidebooks and souvenirs, just feet from the site that Babbitt would later lease for his image-making. He saw it all from this Point View spot: the parade of people with whom he collaborated, the rush of water and its disappearance, the small island that separated the American and huge horseshoe shape of the Canadian Falls, and the stone tower that stood at the edge of the horseshoe from 1833 to 1873.

Eventually, Babbitt went on to make ambrotypes and glass stereo views all around the Falls—behind the cascades, at the whirlpool, in the groves, on the islands, in the village. He photographed the local daredevils, bridges, byways, and hotels. A fine photographer, and one of the first photojournalists, Babbitt had the nerve to scramble down the bank of the gorge for a good shot, summer or winter. Despite his apparent success, at some point in the 1860s Platt Babbitt mysteriously dropped from sight. But in 1873, the local paper announced that he had returned, after “several years of retirement,” and was once again making beautiful pictures; this time they were glass positive transparencies that were designed to be seen in the light from a window. In 1879, another story appeared in the local press, announcing Babbitt’s suicide. It described how the man who had worked for decades on the brink of a precipice nearly 180 feet high had tied a stone around his neck and threw it into a creek no more than three feet deep, where he was later found face down.

The word Niagara comes from the Iroquois, Onguiaahra, meaning “thunder of waters.” Platt Babbitt, after all of that, chose to die in the silence of a small creek south of Buffalo.