‘Sights Once Seen’ an Epic Reimagining of a Trip West

If the early 19th century process of daguerreotypy represents photography in its infancy, you might assume that today’s digital technology brings the medium to full maturity. For better or for worse. Technically, the photographic process has never been easier or quicker. But that ease lends photographs a commonness that makes them less consequential, simpler to dismiss with jaded half attention.

The conditions of infancy offer a good corrective. For all of its logistical challenges and sticky surfaces, infancy is a time of wonder and discovery. Everything, absolutely everything, is fresh. New. A source of awe.

A compelling exhibition now at the Huntington Library sends us back to that state of utter openness, back to the era of the daguerreotype and its power of first impressions. The show, “Sights Once Seen: Daguerreotyping Fremont’s Last Expedition Through the Rockies,” takes us on a circuitous, provocative journey. Our guide is Robert Shlaer (born in 1942), a man who straddles 19th and 21st centuries, having given up a career in theoretical biology to become a professional daguerreotypist.

The daguerreotype, a unique positive image on a copper plate covered with highly polished silver, made its dramatic debut in France in 1839. That same year, in England, another photographic process--the calotype--was unveiled. It offered less image clarity than the daguerreotype, but being a negative-positive process, it had reproducibility in its favor.

Photography’s technical evolution spun off from the calotype, but for nearly 20 years, daguerreotypes were the rage. “Their exquisite perfection,” a journalist marveled, “almost transcends the bounds of sober belief.”

Because daguerreotypes turned out best under the controlled conditions of the studio, the process was used primarily for portraiture. The outdoors proved too fickle an environment to produce consistent results, and the process required a good deal of on-the-spot preparation of plates, relatively long exposure time and development shortly thereafter. Landscape daguerreotypes exist, but not in great numbers, and daguerreotypy never attained the scientific, cartographic and political usefulness that later photo processes did on survey expeditions of the American West. But it’s not, as we learn from this show, for lack of trying.

As early as the 1840s, survey teams attempted to document their explorations via daguerreotypes, but with scant success, and photography’s key role in the era is generally ascribed to the late 1860s and ‘70s. Yet the first comprehensive photographic documentation of an expedition occurred much earlier, as Shlaer’s show (organized by the Museum of New Mexico) and its tremendously useful catalog reveal. In 1853-54, Solomon Nunes Carvalho (1815-1897) successfully produced 300 daguerreotypes on a five-month expedition headed west from Kansas City across the Rockies. The journey was organized by the larger-than-life figure of Col. John Charles Fremont (1813-1890), Civil War major general, California senator, presidential candidate, dubbed the “Pathfinder” for his successful explorations blazing overland trails to the West.

Fremont had brought along daguerreotype equipment on several of his expeditions, even his first in 1842, but he never managed to produce legible images. For his fifth and final journey in 1853, he hired a professional. The stakes were high and his ambition bold. Photographs were to have measurable impact on government decisions in the decades to come--persuading Congress to establish Yellowstone as the first national park, for instance. Fremont recognized early their potential in lobbying for a cause.

The transcontinental railroad was, at this time, still a twinkle in the eyes of the nation’s legislators. Political feuding had erupted over which states it should pass through. Fremont, echoing the platform of his father-in-law, former Missouri Sen. Thomas Hart Benton, advocated a central route, keeping roughly to the 38th parallel and bypassing the Southern, slaveholding states. Fremont had tried to prove the route passable once before in 1848, but the expedition failed, sacrificing 10 men to freezing and starvation. In 1853, Congress agreed to sponsor several expeditions to determine the most viable route, but Fremont missed out on a commission. With characteristic bravado, he financed his own survey and set out to demonstrate the viability of the central route in winter, under the most challenging conditions.

As expeditions go, this one failed almost as badly as the one before. Crossing the Wasatch Mountains in the deep snow and bitter cold, the company was forced to abandon all extraneous baggage and kill its horses for food. The group gave up on the journey in the Little Salt Lake Valley of Utah, finding refuge among a small settlement of Mormons. The men arrived there barefoot and desperate, and yet in possession of the 25 pounds of daguerreotypes that Carvalho had made along the way.

The images were brought to New York, copied (by Matthew Brady’s famous studio) using the wet plate method, and the prints were given to artists to make engravings. The reproductions were intended to illustrate Fremont’s report on the expedition, but the report was never written. The daguerreotypes and their copies went into storage in a New York warehouse. In 1881, a fire destroyed all of the images but one, burning a hole right through photographic history.

Shlaer’s project patches that hole, not only through extensive scholarship, but also through the creation of a new set of daguerreotypes, made from 1994-1998, when Shlaer meticulously retraced the expedition’s route. The results, soberly installed in the Huntington’s Library Exhibition Hall, number 101 scenes and are accompanied by numerous reproductions of surviving engravings made from Carvalho’s daguerreotypes. Shlaer’s images are small (4 inches by 5 inches), just a bit smaller than an average postcard, a perfect scale for the hand. Their surfaces are slightly milky, and certain areas verge from the monochrome toward tones of sand and blue smoke.

Fremont’s expedition was no pleasure trip, and Carvalho’s images no romantic travelogue. Judging by the engravings, Carvalho recorded the beauty of the terrain, but with priority on information over drama. Engravers subsequently took some liberties with the images, positioning coyotes and camp scenes in the foreground for added interest. Shlaer abides by the straightforward tone set by his predecessor, shooting broad vistas and interesting topographic features with an emphasis on maximum clarity and description. The drama in the work is implicit--in the arduous nature of the trek itself for the 19th century surveyors, and in the newness of the landscape to Americans before the West was easily accessible.

Like the post-Civil War photographers of the West, whose darkroom wagons sometimes appeared within the frame, Shlaer inserts himself into a picture or two. In one image, he stands beside his van, which he calls his Travelling Daguerrean Saloon. Venting hoses slither off the roof of the vehicle and into the adjacent woods, dispelling mercury vapors used to develop the plates.

Without Carvalho’s originals for comparison, it’s impossible to track the cultural and geological changes that have imposed themselves on the land in the last 150 years. Nearly all of Shlaer’s daguerreotypes show a still-pristine wilderness. A paved road, or more poignantly, a span of railroad tracks, occasionally slices through the frame, but what latter-day developments Shlaer edited out of his field of vision can’t be known. His enterprise hasn’t the same symmetry, then, as the Rephotographic Survey Project of the late 1970s, whose participants paired their own images with those made from very nearly the same tripod holes a century earlier by Andrew Russell, Timothy O’Sullivan, William Henry Jackson and others. Shlaer used a detective’s cunning to gather clues from journals, reproductions and other accounts, but he still had relatively little to go by in determining placement, angle, scope and even the subjects of his pictures.

Like a work of historical fiction, Shlaer’s project is of the present and the past, a fascinating blend of speculation, imagination and documentation. Shlaer has filled a void, but in the spirit of the best historical inquiries, he fills it, in part, with new questions.

Experiencing the work becomes, as a result, slightly but evocatively destabilizing. Our frame of reference remains stubbornly out of alignment with Carvalho’s and Fremont’s. Shlaer’s project exposes the gap, but it also attempts to bridge it. In reconstructing these views, Shlaer revives the sense of awe and adventure that allied the new medium of photography to the untamed American West. He sends us back to our wise infancy--as a nation and as consumers of the visual.

The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, (626) 405-2100, through Nov. 30. Closed Mondays.