This is one of the four earliest photographic images made of Singapore, just five years after Louis Daguerre invented this process in France. This daguerreotype, popular from the early 1840s to the 1850s, was one of the first commercially used processes to record a permanent but laterally reversed image. It is identified by its highly polished silver surfaces and by the fact that at different viewing angles, the image appears either as a positive or negative. This daguerreotype was taken from Government Hill (present-day Fort Canning) by Alphonse-Eugene-Jules Itier, a French Customs Service officer who was impressed by the commercial buzz in Singapore. This scene was a classic landmark view often sketched and painted by visiting European artists in the 19th century.
