Carleton Watkins Valparaíso 1850--New Directions
Background Summary: Very little is known about the Boehme Studio of Valparaíso. For example, we lack the man’s given name. The 1851 advertised business address was the same as that of the prominent bookbinder, Adolfo Boehme,[20] who is not known to have made daguerreotypes. Nor have any daguerreotypes survived that can be securely identified as the work of the Boehme Studio. The Boehme Studio was also associated with Adolfo Alexander and a man known only as “Bleyfus” found in the caption to figure 13 above. The now lost source daguerreotypes for figures 12 and 13 suggest skillfully chosen viewpoints and compositions that would have required significant experience at prospecting for the best viewpoint. Moreover, the two engravings are compositionally and stylistically related to figures 4-5, 6-8, and 10 above, which suggests they were made by the same person. It appears the Boehme Studio, like Helsby, acted as agent to publishers for the rights to employ daguerreotypes in their possession as sources for engravings. It is likely that the Boehme Studio was the owner, but not the maker of the source daguerreotypes.
The above tables and associated background summaries record more than forty daguerreotypes that were made in the field in Chile, a number greater than comparable views known to have been made in the field around New York and Philadelphia during the same period of time. For example, New York City was the center of photography in America in 1850, but just one comparable view is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art,[21] and two are held by the Museum of the City of New York.[22] Moving to the second most important American center of photography in 1850, Boston: out of the 1,997 works in the complete illustrated catalog of daguerreotypes by the firm of Southworth and Hawes, just 82 are outdoor views, of which 24 show scenes in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts and 21 show winter scenes of a visit to Niagara Falls, New York. Southworth and Hawes made more than 1,900 portraits and just 82 outdoor views, 45 of which were special projects. Moreover, all the outdoor views are dated to 1850 or after by Romer and Wallis,[23] and thus were simultaneous with the Chilean flowering.
Think about the statistics: only California, where Watkins settled in mid-1850, and Massachusetts surpass Chile in the number and range of outdoor daguerreotypes that were known to have been made in single circumscribed geographical locations in the Americas. This was a notable