by Edward Ball
In 1848, two weeks after Mexico capitulated, white prospectors in California found gold in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, and within a year, fifty thousand migrants arrived from the East Coast. Twenty-five thousand came the next year, and in 1850 California rode to immediate statehood on a fuel of nationalism and money. “We all understand the emotions connected with the word California,” said the New York Knickerbocker. The feelings flying around gold dust. “Did not its discovery cause millions of hearts the feeling of avarice?” In Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Charleston, the West meant gold, freedom, rough justice, easy sex, and sometimes paid work. California was the main chance, and an antidote to boredom. The eastern states saw the West much as Europe had regarded its New World colonies—as a dangerous place where money could be made, where all desire found its object. Which was why Helios had come the first time, during the 1850s.
Now he was back, his desires changed; this time he wanted room to be an artist. Fortunately, he knew some of the earliest generation in San Francisco, the Gold Rush migrants, the ones who had stayed—like his friend Silas Selleck. Selleck was the American he had known longer than any other. The two had become friends in New York City fifteen years earlier, when Selleck was a young camera operator at the Mathew Brady Gallery on Broadway, and Helios was a twenty-year-old immigrant to New York named Edward Muggeridge. Selleck had come to California, panned for gold like everyone else, but came to his middle-class senses. He now lived in San Francisco and ran his own photography studio, the Cosmopolitan Gallery of Photographic Art, at 415 Montgomery Street. Looking for a start as a photographer, Helios tracked down his old friend Selleck, who invited him to set up in the gallery as a new freelancer. Selleck allowed Helios to use the gallery as his own and probably also shared his cameras and lenses and chemicals. And he made room for the beginner’s prints on display tables where customers might see them.
Muybridge spent most of his years in San Francisco working on Montgomery Street (pictured here about 1866). In 1867 he began his photography career in the studio of Silas Selleck at 415 Montgomery, in the tall building painted on the side in large letters “Selleck’s Photographic Gallery.” (Illustration Credit 3.4)
When he started, Helios needed subjects that might give him an income. The most lucrative genre of photography had always been portraits. Silas Selleck had done them for years, beginning with the old image technology, daguerreotypes. After that, Selleck moved on to the newer visiting cards. A French invention, cartes de visite were four-by-six-inch calling cards with the client’s photograph on them. There was another format selling well, which Helios could try—stereographs. “Stereos” were stiff cards, four by eight inches, with two nearly identical photographs on them, side by side. They fit into a viewer that looked like a pair of opera glasses on a handle, and the cards seen through the device produced a three-dimensional image. Stereos sold heavily in bookstores and at stationers, and families built collections of them, creating the first era of 3-D, the 1860s.
Photography had changed as rapidly as California. Some called it an art, some a science, but whatever its nature, the thing was just twenty-five years old. Henry Fox Talbot in England and Louis Daguerre in France have good but not sole claim to be the medium’s inventors, during the 1830s. (The word photography, “light writing,” came from a chemist and astronomer, John Herschel, in London, in the year 1840.)3 Photochemistry uses silver halides, crystals of salt and silver that react when exposed to light. This was true from the medium’s beginnings until about 2000, when digital light sensors displaced chemical ones. When a surface painted with a silver halide is exposed to light, some of the crystals convert to elemental silver, and with this reaction, light traces an image. Louis Daguerre spread silver solution on polished metal plates, Fox Talbot soaked paper in it. Daguerre, a painter of panoramas who stumbled into photochemistry, collaborating with a mentor who possessed a melodic name, Nicéphore Niépce, invented the positive image in photography, a one-time view that could not be reproduced. Talbot, a gentleman scientist, invented the negative, a template that could be struck into copies. Daguerre and Talbot announced their separate creations in 1839.4
After that came a strange turn of events. Daguerre patented his invention in France and England, whereupon the French government bought the Paris patent from him and made it public domain—anyone could use the Daguerre process if they bought a few pieces of equipment. Meanwhile, the British patent on daguerreotypes stayed in place. Daguerreotypes spread across Europe and America, but not to Britain, where the steep cost of a Daguerre license meant no one could operate a studio.
The second photo process, the calotype, came from Fox Talbot. Aside from the national polarity—Daguerre from France and Talbot from England—the two had personal disparities. Daguerre was an artist who worked in the theater, while Talbot had served five years in Parliament, possessed a fortune, belonged to the Royal Society, was the grandson of an earl, had published books of archaeology, and lived in a fifteenth-century manor, Lacock Abbey, where he converted a stone barn into a photography workshop. When he coined the word calotype, Talbot leaned on his classical education, using a Greek phrase he liked for “beautiful template.” Talbot patented the calotype, but no government stepped in to give it away, so the upper-class inventor became a businessman and sold licenses as high as the market would bear.
In America, Helios’s friend Silas Selleck and hundreds of others opened royalty-free daguerreotype studios, which delivered to customers a flinty, palm-sized picture of themselves that took three minutes to expose and came in a velvet case. In Britain, because of Daguerre’s and Talbot’s patent fees, photography went nowhere. In 1851, after a dozen years of photochemistry, only fifty people tried to eke out a living as “photographers.”
Daguerreotypes became obsolete about 1855, pushed aside by a new negative process, “wet plate” photography (this one also free for the taking), that let you make copies of pictures. Portraits remained the moneymaking genre, although they now took the form of cartes de visite, full-body or upper-body shots in a studio against a painted backdrop.
It was probably with Silas Selleck’s help that Helios found his first clients. The trouble was that the photographer Helios does not seem to have liked taking pictures of people. He did not care for the nice-family genre, showing nice couples with their nice possessions and nice children on hand. At the start of his professional life, in other words, Helios shut off much of his potential income. He would photograph you outside, in front of your house, but he would not photograph you alone, or indoors. Certainly he would not photograph you surrounded by the props a studio used to frame its customers—the backdrops, sculpture, and fake columns.
Muybridge, Residence of James Rogers at Watsonville, California, ca. 1879 (Illustration Credit 3.5)
It would be difficult to find subjects who look less happy than those photographed by Helios in some of his early images. In one set of what we might call his “house” pictures, Helios depicted the Rogers family of Watsonville, California, posed next to their fine, freshly built Greek Revival home. The people in the pictures appear cowed. Helios has consigned them to sit in the horse paddock and obscured their house behind a tree. In his photograph of the Lent family house on San Francisco’s Rincon Hill, a group of children wearing their Sunday best stand in front of a Gothic mansion; they look just about as comfortable and natural as the stone statuary that frames them. Helios seemed to have an aversion to the respectable class of Californians whom, a few years earlier, he might have seen living in a covered wagon and eating dried beef. And to be fair, to judge from his clients’ faces and body language, the nice families that hired Helios did not seem to care for him as a man. He turned to landscapes.
In June 1867, Helios took a stagecoach to the folds of central California, into Yosemite Valley, to make his first commercial series, a group of photographs with a theme. The trip would either make him a success or show him to be just another talker in the big-mouthed West. Yose
mite Valley, two hundred miles east of San Francisco, was a seven-mile-long gash in the mountains, a strange and ravishing geo-formation with vertical rock faces, gauze waterfalls, and mirroring lagoons. Some regarded Yosemite as proof California was an Eden. Helios had been there once before, and this time he would not let the beauty of Yosemite paralyze him.
Only a few white people, trekking out from San Francisco, had seen Yosemite—240 tourists in 1864, 360 the next year, 450 in 1867.5 And yet through word of mouth, engravings, and big paintings by landscape artists like Albert Bierstadt, Yosemite had acquired a large aura. It was becoming, already, something like a trademark of the West. Depending on who wrote about it, the valley could appear to be either a peaceful enclave or nonnegotiable majesty, indifferent or welcoming, a sign of American empire or an index finger that pointed to democracy. Yosemite was a projection screen that took on what you threw at it.a
It did not add to the sublime reputation of Yosemite that miners and militiamen had entered the valley and clashed with native people, a tribe called the Ahwanichee, scattering their villages on a murderous raid. But since then, Congress itself had consecrated Yosemite as the untouchable symbol of the state of California.
And now, if only someone could make sense of it, using photography. Two photographers had already been out to Yosemite from San Francisco, trying to represent the enigma of the valley and elevate it to myth. Helios was the third, and at minimum, the most energetic. He rented rooms in the Yosemite Hotel, at the north end of the valley, the single place to sleep when you were not on the ground (although he also slept there), and the only place to store his gear. The money for the trip probably came from a publisher. In San Francisco, a man called John Hittell was working up the first book-length guide to Yosemite, and he wanted to illustrate it with photographs, which would be “tipped in,” or pasted to the page. (This was before half-tone printing let you print photographs on paper.) Helios had received the assignment.
He might have borrowed the hardware from Silas Selleck. He brought a “half plate” camera, which made a six-by-eight-inch negative. (A “full plate” made negatives not quite double this, measuring eight by ten inches.) He brought a “stereo camera,” which had two lenses protruding from it, to make the hugely popular stereographs, which would be the moneymaker, if anything made money. He carried canned food, and probably a gun. With all the apparatus, he was like a machine invading the wilderness.
For at least five months he roamed the valley. In November 1867, the Mariposa Gazette reported the journeyman photographer was “still at Yosemite, after this long time.”6 Helios put on the mask of unaccommodated man, disappearing into the remoteness of nature, throwing off culture, shedding its skin. During the day he hired men and mules to carry his gear. He hired guides, possibly Indians whose villages had been broken up. He photographed landmarks Californians were starting to know—Glacier Point, Sentinel Dome, and Taft Point—and he went to upper Yosemite Fall. He photographed one of his own campsites. The image shows a clearing in the woods, scattered with crates and bottles, and in the middle, a tent with the dimensions of a closet (his darkroom). His floppy hat, the sign of a wanderer, sits somewhere. The name “Helios” appears on a tree limb, like graffiti—it has been scratched into the negative.
Yosemite was known to surveyors. In summer 1866 a team came from Sacramento led by Josiah Whitney, the state geologist, and in 1867, a party exploring the fortieth parallel arrived, led by the surveyor Clarence King and accompanied by a former Civil War photographer, Timothy O’Sullivan. These were among many expeditions through the West, some of which combined military maneuvers and mapping, like those under the command of General A. A. Humphreys, head of the federal Corps of Engineers. America had grown vastly in thirty years, and the people back east, especially in Washington, D.C., had persistent questions: What are these giant pieces of land that America has grabbed up, and bought up, and taken by war? What are our “territories”?
Muybridge, The Flying Studio, Photographer’s Equipment in the Field, 1867. On his trip to Yosemite Valley, Muybridge created a darkroom (a shower-like tent to hide negatives from light), poured ample chemicals (including the flammable syrup known as collodion, seen here in bottles), and, to judge from the title of this picture, saw himself as a new kind of location photographer. (Illustration Credit 3.6)
Muybridge, Little Grizzly Fall, 1867. Stereograph. Many photographs in Muybridge’s Yosemite series show an attachment to rushing waters, swollen rivers, whitewater runs, and waterfalls, as though the photographer is obsessed with motion. (Illustration Credit 3.7)
American landscape photography began at Yosemite, and Helios was at the start of it. The year before he came, photographer Carleton Watkins, a New Yorker transplanted to California, made pictures of the peaks and gorges, as had Charles Leander Weed, a photographer who made serene, static compositions from the outlines of the rock faces and pools. Helios took a different approach. He was drawn to the watercourses, staying close along the Merced River, photographing its whitewater runs, its cool, still flows, the water spewing out from crevices. When you look at his later pictures, the ones that capture motion, it does not appear to be a coincidence that he was attracted to moving water. Rivers and waterfalls clock the passage of time, and the photographer Helios returned obsessively to the seeping and sprays, visual markers of time wheeling ahead, as though he wanted to seize them.
The Watkins and Weed pictures had sold, but both had photographed the voids of the valley, attaching the eye to vistas and vanishing points. Their subject at Yosemite was space, but Helios’s subject, in many photographs, was time.
Muybridge, Kahchoomah, Wild Cat Fall, 30 Feet High, 1868. Muybridge preferred Native American names for sites in Yosemite Valley, during the same period when whites were erasing Indian designations. (Illustration Credit 3.8)
The experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton, one hundred years after Muybridge, described how Helios’s pictures at Yosemite gathered up duration, giving it the form of a tesseract, the extension of three dimensions into the fourth one, time. The waterfall photos “produce images of a strange ghostly substance that is in fact the tesseract of water,” Frampton said of the liquid’s geometry. “What is to be seen is not water itself, but the virtual volume it occupies during the whole time interval of the exposures.”
His most literary photograph of water is a self-portrait, an image about the passage of time, and about death, he called Charon at the Ferry. While walking deep at the base of the valley, Helios made this image, which shows the photographer himself standing on a dock beside the slow-moving Merced, the habitual hat on his head, and in his left hand, a heavy rope that droops into the water. The title refers to Charon, the ferryman of death in Greek myth, the enigmatic boatman who carries the souls of the dead across the River Styx to Hades. The Merced has become the Styx and Helios the messenger of death, the messenger of time’s end.
To prepare a single image took time, many minutes of the messenger’s time. First he chose the site, which might require a half day on foot and on the back of a mule, then he set the tripod and aimed the camera. The exposure itself involved a graceful choreography peculiar to wet-plate photography. The photographer poured the flammable syrup called collodion—which would become the base of the light-sensitive emulsion—evenly across a glass plate, immersed the glass covered with goo in a bath of solution that contained the silver halide (while hiding it from light under a black hood), inserted the drippy plate in the camera, removed the lens cover and then replaced it, withdrew the plate and bathed it, still hidden, in a solution of acetic acid and iron sulfate, which developed the image, and finally washed the glass plate in a solution of sodium hyposulfite, or “fixer,” to stop the silver reaction. One negative came out of this minuet.
Muybridge, self-portrait, Charon at the Ferry, 1868. In a stereograph, the photographer depicted himself as a figure from Greek myth, Charon, the ferryman of death who conveys souls across the River Styx to the afterlife in the
underworld of Hades. (Illustration Credit 3.9)
In Yosemite, Muybridge encountered not only nature and the sublime, but also lumbermen cutting down the ancient trees in the Mariposa Grove of sequoias at the southern end of the valley. (Illustration Credit 3.10)
It sounds cumbersome, but wet plate actually sped up the photography market. With negatives on glass, photos spread everywhere, because paper prints could be mass-produced from them, and the 3-D stereograph spread the fastest. In Britain, a man called George Nottage set up the London Stereoscopic Company in 1854; after five years the company had a stock of 100,000 different stereos, the majority of them of buildings and landscapes, the kind of photography Helios wanted to do.7
The type of stereo camera that Muybridge probably took to Yosemite, made by the Scovill Company of New York (Illustration Credit 3.11)