Carleton Watkins Daguerreian in the Mother Lode
for photographers to operate out of a physical location, to advertise their services in the local newspaper, and then to wait for customers to show up to have their portraits made. Sometimes Carleton could have quietly done the same [Fig. 13] as we know he also practiced daguerreian portraiture.[26] On the other hand he would have encountered most of his subjects in their adopted habitats during business transactions in the gold fields while he was making deliveries and taking orders.
Carleton would have arrived at the customer's worksite in a wagon similar to that shown in [Fig. 14]. Let us not forget that a mining claim was a secure area and could not be approached by just any stranger. The photographer would have to be someone known and trusted by the miners such as the man from Huntington & Hammond making his delivery. There would have been very few, if any, other daguerreian photographers who had the credentials needed for access to secure mining camps.
Work would stop while the goods were unloaded and payment made. We can imagine the miners heard news of the outside world from Carleton while they shared stories about their mining exploits. During the social dialogue we can imagine Carleton making his pitch to create a photograph of the men at their tasks. Once agreed he would choose where to position the camera and then skillfully direct the miners to their places. In [Fig. 14] two men wield shovels while standing on either side of the long-tom as water flows out of its front end towards the camera. Two other men are posed at the wagon, one in the driver's seat holding the horse's reins, while the other man (who appears to be a person of color) stands jauntily pipe-in-mouth at its rear. The scene is carefully staged. Nothing in the composition of the picture is left to accident and any change in its visual structure would have left something out of balance. Such compositional perfection became the defining element of Carleton's visual style in the wet-plate era.
The picture-category of miners-at-work is unusual because there is, typically, no readily identifiable person who would have paid for the photographer's time and materials [Fig. 15]. As one-of-kind objects, daguerreotypes were most typically created for a single client who could be clearly identified, and who paid the daguerreian photographer to make the picture. The great majority of surviving daguerreotypes were portraits of one or two sitters made in rooms specifically fitted-out for the purpose. However, when a daguerreotype consists of a group of working men shown in their workplace, where each is apparently of equal status, and all are encountered in a context with no discernible corporate identity, we have a