Considering the modern day ubiquity of dick pics, it seems like men have a deep seated need to take pictures of their penis and distribute them. Were there ever dick daguerreotypes?

by vosemdesyatvosem

A quick google came up with nothing, but I’m still hopeful. It just seems like, you know, the first thing a guy does when he gets a camera is to take a picture of his penis so... where are those good good July Monarchy dick pics?

AnnalsPornographie

A quick google came up with nothing, but I’m still hopeful... [for vintage] dick daguerreotypes?

Sure OP... 😏

Although no research has been done into why modern men are so insistent on pointing their phones at their dick and firing off pictures with poor lighting and terrible angles (get yours solidly critiqued here [NSFW link. Actually, assume every link in this post is NSFW], there are two rather simple explanations as to why this is a relatively new phenomenon, and why there was no secret Victorian trade in dick daguerreotypes: (1) length [heh] and (2) width of the stack of bank notes you'd have to put down.

I'm not sure how long or how much you've experimented with taking pictures of your dick, OP, but if you wanted to get in on the real vintage game, you would be expected to hold the visible object very still for several minutes. Although this might be possible with porn-star levels of control (compliments to your significant other) it does lend itself to complications of lighting (flash bulbs and nudity have a tendency of not playing well with each other), as well as the period of time in which you can contemplate your poor life decisions. Perhaps this is one reason we don't have much in the way of victorian dick. This partially explains why so much early photography is still life or landscape--it is hard to take a picture of people having sex. Even if you were to use slightly more modern technology, with bromide film, it would take you about 60-90 seconds of holding the camera at the object in question, but it still leads us into the second and biggest reason as to why there is not an archive of antique dick picks for modern inspiration: cost

Early photographic equipment was expensive as all hell, even when the inventor sold his copyright to the french state for the good of all humanity, it remained expensive to buy the equipment and the film and to get models to take naked pictures of. In the beginning, photographs were expensive (as much as a week's salary for the average person), and their high cost limited the purchasers to the upper-classes. The first publishers and connoisseurs—Hans-Michael Koetzle notes in 1000 Nudes: A History of Erotic Photography—saw this as a good thing, as the prices kept the number of customers to a manageable level, and confined to “social classes respected for their moral integrity and ethical stability.” The improved technology which allowed mass printing and lowered costs was what caused things to become, “‘problematic’ in the pleasure-dampening and prudish Victorian sense.”

According to Alexandre Dupouy's Erotic Photography, a certain optician named Noël-Marie Paimal Lebours claimed to have taken the first nude photograph by 1841 (I could not find a copy of it however!). Hilariously enough, when the first commercial photographs went on sale in France, they were available from the offices of opticians, and in the salons of high-end art dealers—not in shady backstreet alleyways (that would come later). The original nude photography was almost like a painting would be done. As Dupouy notes:

They mimicked artists and painters by making pastiches of their compositions and the use of accessories, including draping, columns and fabric. In fact, most of the precursors of photography came directly from painting. The interconnection between the two processes seemed obvious: photographers were inspired by painters, and painters made use of photography. With photography, artists no longer had to put up with models who either did not turn up or were late.

They pretended to sell to painters as a way of replacing finicky and no-show models for their paintings. As a result you see photographs like this, very refined and artistic.. That second to last picture in there is one of the only daguerreotypes in the Uwe Scheid collection (the largest archive of erotic photography) that includes an erection, and is perhaps a mis-dated later photograph. And then when it became cheap enough, they sold to the much much larger market of straight men, not gay men. Finally, although men in todays society seem to think that their dick might get a women to sleep with them, historically the first sexual move was more likely to be giving the low-standards woman or man of your choice an erotica like Fanny Hill rather than insanely expensive daguerreotypes or plates.