Mark Johnson, owner of a south hills graphics firm, is president of the Daguerreian Society (www.daguerre.org ), an organization composed of individuals and institutions with an interest in daguerreian photography—the world’s first photographic process, 1839-1855. Founded in 1988, the society, with 1000 members worldwide, publishes a bimonthly Newsletter and a 200+ page book, The Daguerreian Annual, making extensive use of digital photography. The Society is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant and Johnson has now begun the many-year project of placing an all-inclusive database of daguerreotypes on the Internet. The site will contain high-resolution digital reproductions and use state-of-the-art interactive zooming technology to allow researchers unprecedented access to these highly detailed images.

His talk, "A Daguerreian Primer," will highlight the history and technology behind the daguerreotype, the men and women who were its pioneers in Pittsburgh, and the challenges of digitally reproducing a daguerreotype, a photograph on a plate of mirror-polished silver.