Carleton Watkins                  Valparaíso 1850--New Directions

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problems they confront, and, in the process invent patterns of performance that define their style.  For Carleton a pattern of visual solutions was firmly established a decade after his time in Valparaíso.  His practice in the wet plate era was to seek an elevated viewpoint from which an overview of the scene looked best and to choose times of day when the sun was low in the sky and to his back in the early morning or late afternoon.  Another pattern was to make more than one picture of scenes that caught his attention, often by rotating his camera one hundred eighty degrees to look in the opposite direction and at other times moving his camera a great distance to a position shown in the background so as to gaze at the position of his camera in a previous view.  

As we shall see in later chapters, when he returned to Valparaíso in the South American fall or early winter of 1852, Carleton had the experience behind him of making the several hundred daguerreotypes in California that we believe were the ones Robert Vance put on view in New York City in October of 1851.  Chapter Ten will investigate some of the repeated patterns that can be found in daguereotypes made in San Francisco and the Mother Lode region of California. Many of these are identified in public and private collections as “maker unknown.”

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End Chapter Nine

Valparaíso 1850--New Directions