[Seated Middle-aged Woman Dressed in Finery] 1854 - 1860

This is a daguerreotype by William Hardy Kent, showing a seated woman in finery, and was likely made sometime in the 1840s or 50s. Photography in this period was a new and exciting medium, but also an exclusive one. Consider the sitter's elaborate lace bonnet, her ruffled collar, and her patterned dress. These signifiers of wealth and status indicate that this would have been a middle-aged woman in a wealthy family. These photographic technologies developed at a time of huge social change, and the emergence of a middle class. The daguerreotype was a means of documenting and cementing that class identity, and displaying it within the home. You could consider this photograph as part of the larger cultural and institutional history of photography and its relationship to class identity in nineteenth-century America. Researching fashion trends and photographic practices of the time could tell us more.