Photography - Ned Denny on the deathly stillness of the first daguerreotypes

That photographic reproduction divests artworks of their uniqueness and their "aura" was a commonplace of 20th-century cultural theory. How strange, then, to read in the catalogue to this exhibition of early portrait photography that the first photographs were in effect treated (and perhaps unconsciously so) as sacred, magical objects. These were the one-off daguerreotypes, heavy metal plates kept "behind gilt-trimmed protective glass set in velvet-lined leather cases held together by a gold clasp". Only when the plate was uncovered and held at a certain angle to the light would the photographic image, flickering between positive and negative, appear in all its spectral detail.

The ceremoniousness of all this is telling, not least that the plates were not only kept hidden, but practically locked away. Photography - especially portrait photography - has something deathly about it, something that the increasingly lifelike snapshots of modern times have tended to obscure. A periodical published in 1853 acknowledged this, observing that "there is something about the daguerreotype that bespeaks a hand not of this world. Surely to punish us for penetrating her mysteries, Nature touches us with the shadowy hand of death in revealing them!" The frozen images of photography are inherently disturbing, as Roland Barthes admits in his book on the subject, but society conceals this "by endowing it with functions, which are, for the photographer, so many alibis".

One of the very first of these "functions" was the celebrity portrait, conceived by the Victorians as a way of exalting and chastening the minds of the public. New technology ushered in the craze for cartes de visite, small-scale photographs of leading figures of the day that could be collected and assembled in albums. Men such as Disraeli, Carlyle and Dickens are shown gazing piously into the distance, although their casual demeanour creates the impression that they have just stepped in off the teeming streets of 19th-century London. Much of the fascination of these photographs derives from all that cannot be seen in these emblems of stillness and silence.

Celebrity photographs were also gathered into bound volumes and published under titles such as Men of Mark and Our Celebrities. Some of these pictures are revealing in unexpected ways. A double portrait shows the notoriously hardline judge Sir Henry "Hanging" Hawkins, both in his judicial garb and relaxing with his dog. In the latter picture, which purports to show his true, animal-loving, liberal self, a single gloved hand is clasped creepily around the animal's throat. But the celebrity status that such photographs conferred on eminent men and women was not without its disadvantages - Tennyson in particular, constantly harassed by people wishing to compare the black and white likeness with the real thing, came to regret ever having gone near a photographer's studio.

The 19th-century obsession with classification and scientific method led to the other main function devised for portrait photography. This was the careful documentation - largely inspired by contemporary theories linking character with facial structure - of the faces of criminals and the insane. These are by far the most moving images in "The Beautiful and the Damned", a new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery; whereas the celebrity portraits merely add to what we already know of the subjects' lives and works, a picture of a Bedlam patient is the only testament of a lost soul. Glancing from their haunted-looking countenances to their handwritten "conditions" - acute dementia, chronic melancholia, and so on - one seems to glimpse the vast, unrecorded mass of suffering humanity. But the curious mix of dignity and misery on their faces is, as one of the photographers observed, beyond the reach of medical jargon: "It is unnecessary to use the vague terms which denote a difference in the degree of mental suffering . . . the picture speaks for itself with the most marked impression and indicates the exact point which has been reached in the scale of unhappiness."

These two functions correspond to the "damned" and the "beautiful" of the exhibition title, the former being the dark reverse of the latter's celebration of progress and nobility - functions that are very much alive today in the form of inner-city surveillance and Hello!-style journalism (itself increasingly a form a surveillance). What is interesting about seeing them in their early forms, however, is the fineness of the line separating a portrait of a celebrated lawyer from that of a lunatic. Early photography - with its head-clamps and its need for absolute stillness - was very much something to which one was subjected, and the long exposure times were notorious for giving even the most benign characters a slightly monstrous aspect. Anybody, in fact, undergoing the intense scrutiny of those primitive cameras - whether "beautiful" or "damned" - seems pathetically exposed. The images that confer immortality on their subjects are themselves haunted by death.

"The Beautiful and the Damned: the creation of identity in 19th-century photography" is at the National Portrait Gallery, London WC2 (020 7306 0055), until 7 October

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