“If you put your daguerreotypes in an inert atmosphere, in the dark, at zero degrees centigrade, maybe theyll last for a thousand years,” said Grant Romer, a former Eastman conservator and a daguerreotype specialist.

How old are daguerreotypes?

Daguerreotypes were sold in Britain throughout the 1840s and into the early 1850s. Access to the studios of photographers working with the daguerreotype process around 1850 would have been limited to the middle and upper classes.