Gurney was declared the country's leading portraitist in 1853 when he won the Anthony Pitcher, the first and most important American photography prize. He made pictures in every major nineteenth-century photographic medium and format beginning with the daguerreotype, capturing the images of not only ordinary men and women but also famous American and English figures such as the Prince of Wales, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain. Chaining the Sun is a fascinating look at the role photography played in the world of nineteenth-century United States, both as a commercial enterprise and as an index of a rapidly changing society.