Credited below the portrait: “BY EVANS & POWELSON / No. 220 Main Street….Buffalo” This is the second extant photograph made in Buffalo, dated within six months, based on the short amount of time Evans & Powelson were business partners at this address. It was just ten years after the photographic process was announced in Paris. Oliver B. Evans, a native of Connecticut, arrived in Buffalo in 1848, a prize-winner in New York State competitions then held in conjunction with agricultural fairs. He partnered with Benjamin Powelson, about whom no information is evident before the partnership in 1849. Powelson later opened studios in Buffalo and Rochester between 1862 and 1885. Although daguerreotypes were created in Buffalo as early as 1840, the first known extant daguerreotype is by Donald McDonnell: a postmortem from 1848 donated in 1867 to the Buffalo History Museum. McDonnell and Evans were rivals before Evans broke off to work with Powelson. McDonnell and Evans, however, later worked together to establish the New York State Daguerreotype Association, the first professional photographic association in the United States. Both separately and together they earned international praise and awards. Evans closed his Buffalo studio in 1856 to move to Niagara Falls, and ended his career in Pennsylvania in the late 1880s. —AB