First Photo Studio
It will soon be difficult to find a man who has not his likeness done by the sun
Today in 1840, Alexander S. Wolcott and John Johnson opened the first commercial photography studio in New York.
In the years that followed, popular interest swelled and commercial studios proliferated. One commentary in the press, in 1843, described “beggars and the takers of likeness by daguerreotype” as the only two groups of people who made money in New York “in these Jeremiad times”: “It will soon be… difficult to find a man who has not his likeness done by the sun…”
Source: Jeff Rosenheim, “‘A Palace for the Sun’: Early Photography in New York City,” in Art and the Empire City, 2000