I knew Dominic at the Michener Center, but The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre was my first (but surely not last) exposure to his work. The book takes place at the end of Louis Daguerre's life, when he suffered delusions caused by his exposure to mercury, the element that made possible his daguerreotype process.
Believing that the world is ending, Daguerre sets out to photograph ten final items, assisted in part by the poet Baudelaire and a prostitute and model named Pigeon. The project comes to focus on finding his childhood companion and the great love of his life, a woman named Isobel Le Fournier. However, the book also examines the creative process itself, the curiosity, obsession, and heartbreak that fueled Daguerre's work -- and that arguably play some role in all artistic enterprises.
About.com: In the acknowledgments, you thank a photography professor for sparking your interest in Daguerre. What about his story intrigued you enough to choose him as the protagonist for your novel?
Dominic Smith: During a graduate photography class I learned about pioneering efforts in photography, in particular the work of Louis Daguerre. His big contribution to the early processes was the use of mercury vapor -- the exposed metal plate image was run back and forth over a mercury bath. Although it cannot be proven, there is speculation among historians that Daguerre may have had mercury poisoning when he died. That was the idea that seized me -- that one of the founders of early photography might have been going mad from mercury poisoning. I wondered how that might alter the way that the artist saw the world.
I began researching Daguerre's biography and formed a picture of who he might have been. Although the Daguerre I created for my book is a fictional character, I tried to stay true to his career trajectory and his artistic interests. One of the things that was compelling about him as a person was that he was obsessed with the idea of trying to "trap" the essence of things. That drive led to the diorama and his work with the daguerreotype. The idea that Nature could sketch herself kept him awake at night.
AC: Had you written historical fiction before this? How did you go about doing research for the book?
DS: I had published a few short stories that were set in the 19th century. Writing these really opened me up to the possibility of rendering a different era. I sometimes think that the hardest things to get right in historical fiction are the nouns -- the food, the carriages, the clothes, the everyday names for things. These are the bricks and mortar of how you define a world and you can't get them wrong or simply make them up. I spent about a year researching Daguerre and the Paris of his time. I was also writing during some of this time, mostly sketches and an outline. I used a lot of different documents in my research -- translations of French newspapers, travel writings about Paris from people like Charles Dickens, Daguerre's description of his process, French novels written between 1840 and 1870. I also spent a lot of time looking at old daguerreotypes. I wanted to capture their mood by using certain kinds of language.
Of course, once I wrote a draft there were gaps in my historical knowledge. But by then it was relatively easy to go back and find what I needed. I believe on some level you have to set the research aside and dive in for the writing. If you've soaked in the nouns and phrases of an era for long enough then you'll be surprised what you can dredge up when confronted with the blank page.
