Why “daguerreotypist” is a great word
DAGUERREOTYPIST — [Noun] A practitioner of the daguerreotype, an early photographic process that fixes a direct positive image onto a silvered copper plate. From daguerreotype (named for its inventor, Louis Daguerre, from his surname + -type, from Greek -typos "impression, model") + the agent-noun suffix -ist ("one who practices"). Unlike a photographer, who commands a generalist's lexicon of light and lens, or an ambrotypist, who conjures an image from glass, the daguerreotypist is an alchemist of silver and mercury. It is the scent of iodine in a darkened box, the meticulous buffing of a plate to a mirror finish, and the patient, still-minute vigil before a subject emerges as a singular, metallic sheen—the artisan of a memory that is also a fragile, physical object, a testament to our first, fragile pact with time.