Carleton Watkins Valparaíso, 1849
place in the early history of European photography because Scottish pioneers of photography, David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, made a portrait of him in Edinburgh around 1845. Hill and Adamson used the paper negative process [Fig. 13], a method that would eventually make the daguerreotype process employed for the Valparaíso views obsolete.
Another reference to the history of photography in the lithograph is the profile figure of a photographer shown standing beside a large tripod-mounted camera [Fig. 14], thus providing sly acknowledgement of the role of photography in realizing the finished lithograph. The size of the camera can be deduced from the relative scale of the camera in relation to the scale of its operator. From top to bottom, the camera extends from just below the photographer's chin to the middle of his chest, a distance of less than one foot. This measurement matches the dimensions of a camera designed to expose plates 8 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches in size, the largest commercially available daguerreotype plate of its time, exposed with an instrument commonly referred to as a whole-plate camera
The whole-plate daguerreotype camera was an unusual and expensive piece of equipment that very few photographers possessed. Robert Vance is known to have equipped his studio with a whole-plate camera,[28] which opens the possibility that while Carleton was working in Vance’s calle de la Aduana no. 113 studio, in late 1849 and the first half of 1850, he experimented with that instrument.
When Carleton arrived in Valparaíso in mid-1849, there was no established tradition of field photography in Chile. For example, there is scant evidence that his nominal mentor, Robert Vance, made any views showing the landscape or architecture during his widespread travels in Chile and other South American locations between 1847 and 1849.[29]Moreover, Carleton's more likely practical mentor in Valparaiso, William Helsby, advertised himself as "Helsby Retratista" (Helsby Portraitist). The practice of portraiture was performed within the controlled environment of the photographer's studio, where the principles of efficiency and productivity ruled.
The truth is that field photography was financially unattractive to portrait photographers worldwide in the daguerreian era. Despite this obstacle, in the time between mid-1849 and Carleton's return to Valparaíso in the spring of 1852, Chile became a location for landscape and city views of quality and originality equal to what was being done in California and the European capitals. In Chapter Nine we will ask: What role could Carleton have played in their creation and what did he do in photography after leaving Valparaíso?
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End Chapter Eight:
Valparaíso, 1849