Carleton Watkins Valparaíso 1850--New Directions

Background summary. Carleton Watkins, as related in Chapters Seven and Eight, is believed to have arrived in Valparaíso for the first time at the end of May or first half of June 1849, when he become a camera operator in the Vance y Cia. daguerreian portrait studio. He is believed to have worked there during Vance’s year-long absence in Bolivia and Peru. Moreover, Watkins is believed to have left Valparaíso for California with Vance in August of 1850 making daguerreotypes in ports of call along the journey north.[17]

Carleton is known for certain to have returned to Valparaíso from New York early in 1852 prepared with the experience of making hundreds of daguerreotype views in California including numerous multi-part panoramas like the source daguerreotypes for the Panorama of Santiago as shown in figure 8 above. Figure 11 above is associated with Carleton on the basis of his interest in retail business establishments in general. However, more specifically, in 1852, when this image is believed to have been made, Carleton was in Chile on business for his California employer, the Sacramento wholesale hardware firm of Huntington and Hopkins, thus establishing a key relevant relationship.

By 1852 Carleton had established in California a new direction in photography by making daguerreotype views for publishers to use as sources for engravings. He had also established a signature picture-making style that involved prospecting for the positions from which the views of places looked best, typically an elevated position looking diagonally into the subject with the sun low in the sky to his back. He also made a practice of creating multiple views that show the same location from different viewpoints, frequently with one image showing the location from which a counterpart image was made, such as figures 12 and 13 below. Moreover, Carleton made dozens of multi-part panoramas like the sources for figure 4 and figure 8. He elegantly repeated this defined practice hundreds of time over more than forty years in stereographs and mammoth-plate photographs created in the wet-plate era,[18] but we are getting ahead of ourselves in the story.

Table IV

Daguerreotypes and Engravings Made in Valparaíso

Associated with the Boehme Studio

A. Credited to Boehme and Bleyfus Studio, Valparaíso. Looking Northwest from Cerro Concepcion. Engraving from now lost two part daguerreotype panorama possibly by Carleton Watkins [Fig. 12].

B. Credited to Boehme and Bleyfus Studio, Valparaíso. Looking East from Cerro Concepcion. Engraving from now lost two part daguerreotype panorama, possibly by Carleton Watkins. [Fig. 13].

C. View of Valparaíso, two part daguerreotype panorama, possibly by Carleton Watkins, formerly in the possession of the descendants of Adolfo Alexander. Present whereabouts unknown. [19]

[17] Catalog of Daguerreotype Panoramic Views, nos. 103-108.

[18] For example, see www.carletonwatkins.org nos. 303, 319, 334, 337, 344 and 670. See also Complete Mammoth Photographs nos. 290, 291, 294, 296, 308, 328, 360-364.