Throughout U.S. history, presidents have participated in photography as subjects, producers, and consumers of photographs. This book project, American Presidents and the History of Photography from the Daguerreotype to the Digital Revolution, investigates how presidents have helped to shape Americans’ experiences of photography across its 175-year history. Using evidence gathered from archival research and the analysis of published texts and images, this talk will show how presidents and presidential images participated in the rise of the earliest photograph, the daguerreotype. Almost immediately upon its introduction in the United States, the daguerreotype became a vehicle for connecting the nation’s present to its past. Photographers in the 1840s eagerly sought out and captured the faces of a dying Revolutionary War generation; daguerreotypes of Dolley Madison, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Jackson – all photographed in very old age – served as material, bodily reminders of the nation’s founding and adolescence. Yet such reminders did not have to be material; they could be allegorical as well. This is evidenced by the number of daguerreotypes featuring adoring children hugging or gazing up at busts or painted portraits of that most iconic of the founders, George Washington. Collectively, such images mobilized the unique characteristics of what John Quincy Adams wryly termed “the Shadow Shop” to teach Americans how they should remember their national past.