Carleton Watkins The Living Present
Around 1850 when it is believed that Carleton learned photography, Vance was positioned in Valparaiso, Chile, where he had lived since 1847, and where he operated a succession of portrait studios in Santiago, Copiapó, and Valparaiso.[26] If Carleton did not go north to California with Collis and the other Otsego County boys in mid-May, 1849, we can infer he must have gone south to learn photography because there was not a single photographer in Panama in 1849 who could have taught him the craft.[27]
Chapter Seven will be devoted to the proposal that Carleton left Panama City in mid-May, 1849, and, fortified by his earnings there, journeyed down the Pacific Coast of South America with stops at the major ports in Peru, Ecuador, and Chile, ending up in Valparaiso, Chile. There were many places along the way to Valparaiso with the generic names of the four apostles and we believe Carleton met his mentor, RobertVance, in one of them.
In Central and South America there was a dynamic interaction between time past, time present and time future which surely would have excited Carleton's incipient aesthetic sensibilities. Carleton changed his plans and decided not to travel north from Panama City with the rest of his group on the ship Alexander von Humboldt possibly because he was seduced by the relevance and beauty of the living present. For Carleton at the age of nineteen in the spring of 1849, seeking his fortune in the Mother Lode was a lower priority than experiencing the diverse pleasures of life itself.
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End Chapter Six:
The Living Present