Carleton Watkins Valparaíso 1850--New Directions
these and all other daguerreotypes created by Carleton before mid-1851; Carleton was an employee and the daguerreotypes were made with cameras and materials Vance had supplied.
In Peru, Vance had already begun making plans to leave Chile for California in July of 1849, a goal advanced in a letter to his Boston supplier of photographic materials: “I intend to go to California and open another kind of business in connection with my picture taking,” Vance wrote to J. H. Hale in Boston from Arequipa, Peru, on July 1.[24] The “. . .other kind of business. . .” to which Vance referred was a scheme for importing small prefabricated shelters from Boston to San Francisco. Vance wrote nothing to his supplier of photo materials about an idea for an ambitious series of daguerreotypes documenting the Pacific Coast of the two Americas as is recorded in his Catalogue of Daguerreotype Panoramic Views. The plan for making ten thousand dollars importing prefabricated structures to San Francisco was his priority.
Vance had originally planned to leave Valparaíso for California in the South American winter of 1850 with his business associate, Mason, who was responsible for printing and jewelry at Vance y Cía. It appears that Carleton joined Vance and Mason for the journey north by steamer. Along the way the vessel stopped to refuel at Calao, Peru, Panama City, Panama, and Acapulco, Mexico.
As we proposed in Chapter Six, unraveling the story requires applying the approach advanced by the historian Hayden White who proposed that "history depends as much on intuitive as on analytic methods . . .history is a kind of art," he wrote.[25] Adherents to Hayden White's school of thinking believe the historical process moves away from science and toward the realm of art when the tool of inference[26]—the process of connecting the dotted lines between isolated factual benchmarks—is applied.[27] Was it just coincidence that the great leap forward away from portraiture to taking cameras into the field happened in places where Carleton was at the same time? We think not.
In the writing of history it is accepted that later events inform on earlier ones[28] and such is truly the case with the life and art of Carleton Watkins. Great artists repeat over and over again the solutions to visual
[24] ALS Vance to Hale, 1 July 1849, from Arequipa, Peru (Private Collection).
[25] Hayden V. White, "The Burden of History," History and Theory, 5 (no. 2, 1966), p. 111.
[26] Robert Brandom, Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism, Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2000, pp. 10-12.
[27] Robert Brandom, Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing and Discursive Commitment, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994, pp. 6, 9, 91, 614.
[28] Paul A. Roth, "The Pasts," History and Theory, 51 (October 2012), p. 313.