From Booklist
This sumptuous volume sets a new standard for excellent daguerreotype reproduction and brings forward the hitherto unknown Thomas M. Easterly as a significant figure in early photography. Kilgo's extensive research and the beautiful pictures support her assertion of Easterly's work as rivaling that of Southworth and Hawes, the Boston partners generally thought to be the finest daguerreotype portraitists. Based in St. Louis, Easterly was at the mid-nineteenth-century frontier, which gave him access to the Native Americans he began portraying in the 1840s and whose portraits constitute one of the highlights of the book. Easterly's main work was portraiture, as was that of all daguerreotypists, but Easterly also made an unusual number of landscapes on the silvery plates, and he continued using daguerreotypy into the 1870s, long after other photographers had switched to the glass-plate collodion process. A valuable, scholarly record, Kilgo's work will delight serious historians as it gives them and even the most casual reader the flavor of the exciting interface of urbanization and wild frontier in mid-nineteenth-century America. Gretchen Garner
