Carleton Watkins “Ho! For California!”
Several material facts concerning Vance’s Catalog of Daguerreotype Panoramic Views in California are relevant. Not a single one of the 131 actual daguerreotypes itemized by Vance in 1851 is securely documented to have survived, although some titles can be provisionally matched to known daguerreotypes based on circumstantial evidence. Another significant fact is that what is described on the title page as a “Catalog” fails to meet the standard definition of that type of publication, generally understood to be “a complete enumeration of items arranged systematically with descriptive details.”[18]
When a photographer catalogs his own work the customary procedure is to assign numbers in the sequence the works were created. This procedure is exemplified by the method of the French daguerreian traveler to Italy, Greece, Egypt and the Holy Land, Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, who created several hundred daguerreotypes during his travels there in the early 1840s [Fig. 5].[19] The plates were numbered and labeled in the sequence they were made. Such is not the case with the Vance list of 131 daguerreotypes. The numbering sequence in Vance’s “catalog” makes no logical sense, nor is it complete or systematic. For example, early first hand reports of the New York exhibition described the collection as consisting of “over three hundred daguerreotypes”[20] while just 131 are itemized by Vance, thus making the “catalog” incomplete. More significant are the errors and omissions in picture titles such as calling “J” Street in Sacramento “Jay” Street (R.V. nos. 123, 125). His failure to give the full proper name of the Sacramento hotel where several views were made (R.V. nos. 123-125)[21] is peculiar given the fact that he was so specific in such matters in other cases (see R.V. nos. 11, 16, 29, 30, 110, 114).
Item-by-item scrutiny of the 131 listed picture descriptions yields errors and omissions of a type that would not have been made by a person who was actually present when the pictures were made. One such example is the lack of descriptive text for no. 119, a puzzling absence since Vance would have known what the image represented and thus would have described it if he had been the maker of the daguerreotype. Then there is the overarching question of whether someone who was the maker of the pictures would have allowed the nonsensical sequence of the inventory.
[18] Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, Springfield, MA: 1965, p. 130.
[19] Important daguerreotypes by Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey from the archive of the artist : Tuesday 20 May 2003. London: Christie, Manson & Woods, [2003], nos. 1-10.
[20]Photographic Art-Journal, vol. II (no. 4, October 1851), p. 252.
[21] United States Hotel, Marysville (nos. 110, 114); Stockton House, Stockton (nos. 12, 61; Union Hotel, Oriental Hotel, Whitehall Hotel, San Francisco (nos. 16, 29, 30).