Carleton Watkins Valparaíso 1850--New Directions
achievement considering Chile’s isolated location and distance from the creative centers of North America and Europe.
What could account for this historical and cultural anomaly? Why did the practice of daguerreotype views made in the field outside the stable environment of a portrait studio flourish within a two hundred mile radius of Valparaíso and not in Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, or Lima, or for that matter in New York or Philadelphia? The answer is a “What if” question. What if the interest, energy and imagination of one person was the root of the Chilean practice? The model for this is the classic art historical pattern of a single genius who initiates an entire regional style or practice. Think Andrea Mantegna in Italy, Albrecht Dűrer in Germany, and Jan van Eyck in The Netherlands. We believe that Carleton Watkins was the person who made the great leap forward for photography in the Americas by abandoning portraiture in 1850 in favor of the risky outdoors.
Carleton was adventuresome by nature being the first in his family to leave his well-fixed existence in Otsego County, New York. He rebelled against the authority of his father at an early age (see Chapter Three) and thus it is no surprise that Carleton struck out for parts unknown with his close friend, Collis Huntington and other young men from his hometown (see Chapter Four). Landing in Panama in 1849 Carleton further expressed his independence by breaking away from the main party that went north to California in the spring of 1849 (see Chapter Five), and instead headed south ending up in Valparaíso, where he met Robert Vance, who introduced him to photography(see Chapter Seven). Carleton would have had the freedom to experiment with the materials of the art to which he had just been introduced and would spend the rest of his years practicing the art he had learned during year he was in charge of operating the cameras at Vance y Cia.
We believe that sometime after the peak arrival of vessels when the portrait business at Vance y Cia. slowed during the South American fall and early winter of 1850 (March-June), Carleton took Vance’s cameras outdoors to experiment with views of the city. When Vance returned to Valparaíso after almost a year’s absence in July and saw what his young apprentice had done, we can imagine an “ah ha” moment when he recognized the potential of an ambitious series of daguerreotypes with Carleton behind the camera showing parts of the New World that few people in North America or Europe had seen before.
Among Carleton’s results could have been the three daguerreotypes Vance took to San Francisco, then to New York and entered into his 1851 “Catalogue of Daguerreotype Views” as numbers 109, 130 and 131 [Fig. 1]. Vance would have been their owner and therefore entitled to put his name on