Carleton Watkins Homo Faber—Man as Maker
During the course of this journey when he was residing in Arequipa, Peru, on July 26, 1849, Vance wrote to his suppliers of photographic materials in Boston. One purpose of the correspondence was to establish himself as credit worthy, which he did through information about how solvent the Valparaiso daguerreian portrait studio was: "My rooms in Valp[arais]o are going on finely. I have got one of the best of fellows in charge of them. He has one half of the profits. I get from $100 to 200. . .every month as my part of the profits." [31] It is unclear whether " the best of fellows" to whom Vance referred on July 26 was his partner, or his unnamed camera operator.
Let us speculate that when he referred to "the best of fellows," Vance had in mind his camera operator in the Valparaiso portrait studio. Let us further speculate that the camera operator was Carleton Watkins. During the course of a year or more doing this work, Carleton would have perfected his daguerreian skills on the job with little or no expert supervision, which fits the story of how Carleton said he got started in photography as told to his first biographer, Charles Turrill.
Carleton's skills in photography would have been learned on the job in Valparaiso from mid-1849 through the first half of 1850 while Vance was in Bolivia and Peru. During this time Carleton would have spent eight hours or more a day making daguerreotypes, and over the course of almost a year in Vance's absence, he would have spent a total of between three and four thousand hours creating pictures and mastering the art. This experience would have gotten him quite a ways to the ten thousand hours that perceptual psychologists say is required to achieve world-class mastery in any endeavor.[32] By the time Vance returned to Valparaiso from his travels "to the coast" [Fig. 5], Carleton was no longer a novice in photography, and may already have begun to stretch the limits of what was possible.
More importantly, during this time Carleton was seduced by the magic and fun of photography. Let us not forget how photography was, and still is, a pursuit full of pleasure and personal satisfaction for its practitioners. Photographers witness a bit of sorcery when the process transforms before their very eyes the three dimensions of life into the fiction of two dimensions like visual poetry.