Carleton Watkins Daguerreian in the Mother Lode
Let us now jump to 1858 when Carleton was working at the Frémont's Las Mariposas mining estate after he had abandoned the daguerreotype process. We have already looked at the daguerreotype of a place named Mormon Island [Fig. 2]. Now let us compare Mormon Island to Carleton's collodion-on-glass negative of a place named "Mormon Bar" that was located at Frémont's Las Mariposas mining estate about fifty miles southeast of "Mormon Island." In addition to the word "Mormon" in their place-names, the two pictures share quite a few visual elements [Fig. 19A and 19B]. The viewpoints are from strategically chosen elevated positions above the subjects, a camera position favored by Carleton in his work with mining subjects of the collodion-on-glass era.[32] The time of day is early morning or late afternoon when the sun is low in the sky, and the light is reflected off the buildings and flowing water. Posed in front of the principal structure in Mormon Bar are six figures, along with a horse and wagon. Such posed figures are a trope in Gold Rush era daguerreotypes like [Fig. 9]; Carleton excelled in orchestrating figures posed at considerable distance from the camera position. Let us look at a few more repeated patterns such as these that are the visual fingerprints of Carleton's visual style as we know it from his glass-plate work of the 1860s.
The view of Smith's Exchange [Fig. 12] can be compared to Oso House, Bear Valley, a proto-mammoth-plate [Fig. 20A and 20B] that was made almost a decade after the daguerreotype. Oso House shows a more refined treatment of the formal elements, but is comparable to the daguerreotype in its visual structure. Carleton excelled at incorporating groups of people gathered in a commercial setting and orchestrated for the purpose of the picture. More than a dozen people are part of Smith's Exchange, including two on the roof of the porch; more than twenty people were orchestrated in Oso House [Fig. 20B]. He favored gazing on his subject from a diagonal viewpoint. He often incorporated wagons hitched to their teams surrounded by their drivers. We can speculate that the team in harness in front of the Smith's Exchange daguerreotype [Fig. 20A] is the very one Carleton used to deliver the goods.
One of the most frequently repeated choices Carleton made was to operate his camera at the beginning or end of the day when the sun was low in the sky and to otherwise orchestrate light and shade. He was abundantly aware that light itself was an important property of a photograph and could compete with the nominal subject for significance in a picture. Light
[32] See Complete Mammoth Photographs, cat. nos. 2, 7, 9, 10-12, 14-21, 24-27, 29-31, 33-37, 40-45, 47, 50-52, 57, 65, 73-76, 78-79, 83-96, etc.