by Robert Wilson, The Boston Globe, August 9, 2013
Despite the severe economic downturn following the Panic of 1837, the photography business in the United States grew at a brisk pace into the 1840s and ’50s. Only two sorts of people were thriving, a newspaperman wrote in 1843, “the beggars and the takers of likenesses by daguerreotype.” In 1853 the New York Tribune guessed that at least 3 million photographs had been taken throughout the country that year. And the 1860 United States Census counted 3,154 professional photographers in the nation.