Around 1850, the Boston photographers Southworth & Hawes made a daguerreotype of an unidentified woman using a sliding plateholder that allowed them to expose the same silvered copper plate again and again.
The result is wonderfully strange: her face appears in shifting profiles around a central portrait, almost like the phases of the moon.
What makes it even better is the technology. No negative. No sequence of prints. No digital compositing. Just an elaborate mechanical solution to the conviction that one portrait was not quite enough.
There is something unexpectedly modern about that idea.
Not merely a portrait, but phases of a person.
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