Highlights of the Daguerreotype in Argentina & Uruguay by Carlos Vertanessian

Born in Argentina, Carlos G. Vertanessian has been a member of the Daguerreian Society since the early 1990s. He earned an agronomical engineering degree at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. His lifetime passion for photography and imagery led him to develop a carrier in marketing, introducing holography to Argentina, and later spreading his business to cover promotional & cultural marketing. For over 35 years Carlos has been collecting early accounts of the origins of photography and daguerreotypes and other hard images taken in Argentina and Uruguay, and has recently become a part time dealer in Latin American images. He has thus put together one of the largest specialized collections in Latin America. Over the last five years he has been actively engaged in a personal crusade to spread the “daguerreian word” in his own country, and also to visit public and private collections elsewhere, to better understand the daguerreian period and the way photography spread around the world. As a special tribute to Daguerre, he has commissioned the creation of a limited edition bronze bust of the “magician of light.” He takes special pleasure in researching and “reading” daguerreian period images, and has published two books relating early photography and visual culture in Argentina. The last one -released in December 2018- is the result of 8 years of research and has a prologue by Grant Romer. This work has gained the highest recognition since both the Ministry of National Culture and the Academy of Fine Arts declared it of “national interest”. In 2019 he helped catalog and curate the collection of daguerreotypes of the National History Museum of Argentina for the publication of a catalogue raisonné, released right after. He believes collecting early photography is about discovering and collecting their stories, and that it should be about “pleasure, knowledge and sharing”. Presented on July 25, 2020.