by Edward Ball
On July 29, 1868, two weeks after Congress approved the Alaska deal, Halleck and Helios left San Francisco on the steamer Pacific.7 They stopped for provisions in British Columbia, one hundred miles north of Seattle, then steamed six hundred miles farther north to the Queen Charlotte Islands. The lower coast of Alaska was home to perhaps ten thousand Tlingit people, Native Americans who had lived there for centuries, plus a few thousand Russian settlers of recent arrival. Finding his subjects by alternating between the two, almost by accident Helios produced, with his camera, some of the first ethnography in North America.
Muybridge, Fort Tongass, Alaska, 1868 (Illustration Credit 5.7)
On the islands (which the Tlingit called Xaadala Gwayee), he photographed some Tlingit as well as a Russian fishing village. The Pacific weighed anchor and sailed another eight hundred miles north (the distances were undeniably vast) to Tongass Island, off the southern Alaska panhandle, where Helios photographed the new outpost of the U.S. Army, Fort Tongass. General Halleck wanted him to get pictures of military sites, so the pair sailed fifty miles to the old Russian outpost of Fort Stikine, renamed Fort Wrangell by the Americans.
Pulling in his subjects, Helios photographed the fishermen’s harbors, wintry floes with barely a building on them, and unpeopled nature. He shot Russian Orthodox clergymen waiting their turn to go back to Vladivostok, and he photographed the Tlingit.
The Tlingit did not welcome what they saw as the new white bosses arriving from California, any more than Indians to the south had welcomed gold-diggers onto the Sacramento River. It had not been many years since Tlingit warriors wearing animal-headed helmets destroyed the Russian settlement at the town of Sitka, killing four hundred settlers and kidnapping the rest. But the Russians had reconquered Sitka and “pacified” the natives before selling their land to America.
In the Tlingit, Helios found another commercial niche. The market for pictures of Indians was a new one, but its genre traits could already be seen. Helios photographed near-naked women and men draped head to toe in caribou hides, and he included totem poles in the background. He photographed the aborigines not in close-up or as individuals, but full figure and in groups, ethnic strangers presenting themselves to the camera with eye contact, available to curious inspection.
Three months later Helios was back in San Francisco, promoting his pictures. He sent around to the papers a letter from Henry Halleck in which the general praised the Alaska photographs, and he printed up a stack of new stereo views that showed the Indians of Alaska, America’s newest and most colorful subjects.
And to this you have to add mention of his clouds. Helios developed a style marker in his treatment of the sky. If he had scant love for people and a strong affinity for both land and city, on the evidence of his early pictures he loved the sky, especially its clouds and moon. He began printing into many photographs an extra canopy of clouds. The writer Helen Hunt Jackson said in the New York Independent that Helios had a thing for clouds. “The skies are always most exquisitely rendered,” Jackson said. “His cloud photographs alone fill a volume; and many of them remind one vividly of Turner’s studies of skies.”8
The technical limitations of wet-plate photography, the universal negatives of the day, meant that most landscapes from this period have washed-out skies. Skies look like white bedsheets in photographs because blue light, the most intense in the spectrum, possesses the shortest wavelength; it blasts the sensitive silver halide and causes overexposure. For Helios, to acquiesce to a blank sky was like leaving one-third of his canvas untouched, and so he added clouds above the horizon in his landscapes, sometimes also a moon. He made dozens of pictures of cloudbanks and printed them in. He photographed the sun behind clouds, a white orb, passing off the result as moonlight.
The problem of the white sky led Helios to design an invention he called the “Sky Shade.”9 In 1869, he patented a device that blocked some of the intense blue light, keeping it off the negative to avoid washout. The May 1869 issue of the Philadelphia Photographer described the Sky Shade, which could be attached to the front of a camera. It worked like a miniature guillotine. During a three-second exposure, the lens would be opened, and on a trigger a wooden shutter or curtain fell halfway over the aperture, dropping to the horizon line and screening the sky above to allow the landscape below a longer exposure. The Sky Shade was yet another piece of time-lapse tampering with the camera.
Muybridge, Cemetery with cloud effect, 1875 (Illustration Credit 5.8)
…and Cemetery without cloud effect, 1875 (Illustration Credit 5.9)
Muybridge, Moonlight Effect on Bay, 1868 (Illustration Credit 5.10)
Muybridge, A Study of Clouds, 1868 (Illustration Credit 5.11)
He loved his clouds and his moon.c While most photographers aimed their lens at well-dressed sitters, Helios turned his camera at the sky, which bewitched him.
The Civil War had ended; Abraham Lincoln was dead. The national disaster had thrown blood across the eastern states, and Reconstruction still commanded the attention of everyone from Boston to New Orleans. But in California the war and its aftermath seemed far away. Few had seen the decimation, and most felt only vicarious grief, through families affected back east. The war mattered not terribly much to new artists like Helios. It mattered to Leland Stanford mainly as the business climate that had launched his fortune.
The West was soon to be linked to the East, and the finish of the transcontinental line looked within reach. In spring 1869, an avalanche of news stories fell around the train, and Helios thought to catch some of the rush by photographing the great machine. He paid his fare, got on one of Stanford’s Central Pacific cars, and took the train from San Francisco, up the Sierras, out to the last hundred miles of the route, in Utah, near the meeting point with the track from the east. His Central Pacific series would be another stack of plates, another speculation to make money from stereo cards, the picture medium for armchair travelers. And it was the last group of pictures he would make as the man with a single name, Helios.
In April 1869, Leland Stanford was in Utah for the last months of construction. As Helios went up and down the line, he and the rail president might have passed each other, but they didn’t meet.
The final miles were still under the grading rakes of the Chinese linemen near Ogden, Utah. Helios crept along the route, got out of the train to shoot, crept along some more. He photographed the boxcars penetrating the valleys in distant plains in a way that made them look like worms on a table. He photographed the bridges over ravines, making their new, latticed wood beautiful, and at the same time rickety and temporary. He photographed the tunnels and cuts, the trestles and snow sheds, the summits, buttes, and lakes. And when it came time to print, he inserted clouds, and sometimes moonlight and fog, on the horizon.
Muybridge, Long Ravine Trestle and Bridge—113 Feet High, 878 Feet Long—Looking East, 1869 (Illustration Credit 5.12)
The Central Pacific had its own photographer, Alfred Hart, who for six years had been documenting the construction of the beast over the mountains. Helios was a freelancer, but Stanford and the associates did not mind more publicity. They did not mind that another photographer spread more images of their organizational genius.10
Was it coincidence that Helios also photographed Indians? As promised by Stanford, bloody standoffs with the “untutored native” had erupted along the train line, lately with the Shoshone. In the Bear River Massacre of 1863, the U.S. Army had killed three hundred Shoshone, and in the Snake War of the last four years several hundred more. By the time the train crept across their land in Utah, the evicted Shoshone were starving and stealing food from Mormon settlements. At Corinne, Utah, Helios photographed the destitute tribe, making their unhappiness look interesting, the same thing he had done with the Tlingit in Alaska. For one photo he persuaded, or more likely paid, a group of Shoshone to stand together and look at the camera. In that picture, a man trains his bow and arrow on the lens, a disdainful witness to the coming of Stanfo
rd’s train.
Muybridge, San Jose, California, train depot with the shadow of the photographer, ca. 1869 (Illustration Credit 5.13)
Muybridge, Buffalo Skulls Beside Central Pacific Track, ca. 1869. The shooting of buffalo herds from moving trains became a pastime of male travelers on the transcontinental line. (Illustration Credit 5.14)
Muybridge, Shoshone Indians at Corinne, Utah, 1869 (Illustration Credit 5.15)
Helios had outgrown his friend Silas Selleck’s gallery—his business was too big. For a time he moved his sales to the showroom of an optician named Ewing, who sold zoetropes and stereo viewers in his store at 138 Montgomery, then he sold through the gallery of an importer of prints and photographs called Adrien Gensoul. In April 1869, Helios moved up to the top of the market, taking his business to the best art dealers in the city.
Charles and Arthur Nahl, who operated a gallery at 121 Montgomery, were the most glamorous of art retailers.11 The “Nahl brothers,” as everyone called them, both made art and sold it—oil paintings, photographs, and oddities like porcelain printed with photos. They were flamboyant, athletic, and not least, European. Charles Nahl, age fifty, and his stepbrother Arthur, thirty-five, had been born in Kassel, Germany, learned to paint and began work in Paris, and had moved together to California during the Gold Rush. It was one of their eccentricities that the Nahls, in addition to being painters and art dealers, were also gymnasts, and that the house they shared at 611 Clay Street was one of the city’s hangouts for athletes. The brothers wrote and illustrated a training manual, Instructions in Gymnastics, and founded the Olympic Club, whose athletes could preen with each other and compete.
The Nahl brothers favored melodrama and exaggeration in their own art. When they made photographs, they loaded them down with ink and paint, both to add color and to turn them into framable decor for living rooms. When they painted—Charles Nahl did the heads, Arthur the bodies—they invented action scenes and mild erotica. In a “Western” scene, an Indian brave poses with his busty, half-naked squaw, the couple appearing as a pair of noble, but sexual savages. The Nahls’ paintings were beautifully finished, heavily varnished, hyperrealist, and sentimental.
When Helios walked in the door at the Nahl gallery, the brothers were exhibiting their newest, most garish history picture, a painting of the famous Mexican bandit Joaquín Murieta, nemesis of Anglo settlers. Hanging prominently in the front room, the painting showed Murieta as a manic man on a black horse charging up a stone path, brandishing a knife and shrieking. It was a picture to feed California’s appetite for myth about itself.
Muybridge, ca. 1869 (Illustration Credit 5.16)
For Helios to associate himself with the Nahl brothers, and they with him, sent a message to San Francisco’s little art world. It meant that the journeyman photographer was one of five or six artists who deserved the city’s attention. The Nahls gave Helios the use of their darkroom. They began to sell his pictures and take a commission, to hang his photographs on display, and to keep behind the desk, in reserve drawers, a little group of Helios images to show their walk-in clients.
When he joined the Nahl brothers, Helios did not know how much his arrangement with these new art dealers, his fourth or fifth, would change things for him. The Nahl brothers’ gallery would deflect his life from its pleasantly successful track. He did not know the German brothers would lead him to his most important client, Leland Stanford. He did not know that through the Nahls he would meet a young woman and have an affair with her, with disastrous results. As it happened, the Nahls were close to the rich men who ran the railroad. As it also happened, among the three employees on the gallery’s payroll was a young woman. She was a photo retoucher, and she worked in the back room, brushing away scratches and filling in little gaps in photographs. She was eighteen, less than half the age of Helios, and her name was Flora Downs.
* * *
a One of the limits of wet-plate photography was that you had to develop the negative fast, or lose the image. Your pictures went into the developing bath on site, or they disappeared, which meant that a photographer who worked outdoors like Helios had to have an obsessive bent, so much greater was the labor.
b In Paris during the 1970s, Roland Barthes thought he heard the wind of time passing in and throughout the camera, which he called “a clock for seeing.” Barthes called the mechanical clicks and snaps, the “metallic shifting of the plates” associated with the making of photographs, “the noise of Time, which is not sad.” The sounds of the apparatus, for that matter, are voluptuous, because they “break through the mortiferous layer of the Pose.”
c The many moonlight settings, all of them shot during the day and underprinted, anticipate what in the movies would become “day for night,” the use of afternoon light and a darkened print to simulate nighttime in a scene.
FLORA DOWNS
Men thought she was fascinating and troublesome in equal parts. Flora Downs left traces of her life in the reports of witnesses and in news stories, but little about her survives in her own voice. A pair of letters she wrote, some overheard talk—the rest comes from others. Nevertheless, this wordless woman burned in the imagination of a lot of people who never met her.
In 1869, Flora Downs was eighteen years old, and she lived alone in a boardinghouse at 6 Montgomery Street, near the corner of Market, a busy, big, noisy road she could probably hear from the window.1 She was married but separated from her husband. She had wed, at age sixteen, a twenty-four-year-old man called Lucius Stone. To marry at sixteen implies a desire to leap off a sinking boat, and then she had leaped again: after eighteen months Flora moved out of her husband’s handsome and comfortable house, and she now occupied a single room. The boardinghouse had five other tenants. She told the census enumerator that she was an artist, although in fact she was a retoucher of photographs. A retoucher of photographs is not an artist. She told the census taker that she was twenty-one, although she was younger. She said she had $700 in the bank, a claim that if true made her the richest tenant both within her building and on much of the block. In 1869, $700 was a considerable sum for an artist, even a successful artist, and she was not a successful artist in the way the older man whom she had recently met was successful. Flora Downs worked a block away from the boarding house in the art gallery belonging to Charles and Arthur Nahl, at 121 Montgomery, and it was there she had met the artist who used to call himself Helios, and who now used the plainer name Edward Muybridge.
Flora Downs, ca. 1868 (Illustration Credit 6.1)
A photograph taken two or three years later shows Flora to have been a diminutive woman with an oval face, alabaster skin, and a loft of brown curls. She sometimes wore a floral arrangement on her head and often a billowing dress, but amid the adornment, her mouth appears fixed and her cheeks emotionless, and little feeling seems present in her almost spherical eyes. Flora’s eyes withhold feeling. She seems to hold out her decorated appearance as an alternative to it.
A newspaperman said she was “voluptuous, with a sweet face and large, lustrous eyes.” Another described “a handsome woman of petite but plump figure with a profusion of beautiful wavy brown hair.” She made an impression on male newsmen, and also on women. One woman said Flora was “impulsive, given to fine dress and flirting.”2 That was at the murder trial.
On a workday Flora Downs, fitted out in petticoats and an ankle-length dress, ruffles at the breast and cuffs, with a hat and maybe a parasol, walked from her boardinghouse to the Nahls’ gallery, where she went to a room at the back and deposited herself at the retouching table. The Nahl brothers paid Flora to doctor their photographs. In wet-plate photography, a scratch or dent on the collodion negative resulted in a white line or blur. Flora’s job was to paint a liquid on the picture base to mask the defect. Sometimes she also did wax work. The Nahls tinted their pictures with paint, and Flora had learned the skill of using wax to guide the liquid pigment. She manipulated a pool of hot wax into the shape of the figures on a photograph and used it t
o channel paint into place, making white skies blue and gray faces pink. Muybridge said that he considered Flora’s wax work some of the best he had seen. It’s also likely that in addition to his attraction to her work, he was attracted to Flora, an eighteen-year-old woman married to another man.
Muybridge testified at the trial that he and Flora had met at the Nahl brothers’ gallery. They probably started seeing each other in mid-1869, and they continued seeing each other for two years while she was still married. Muybridge said that he and Flora did not have sex during this time. His words were opaque: “I was acquainted with her in this way, but not intimately.”
Jane Stanford, wife of Leland, went by “Mrs. Stanford” for most of her life, but her husband and friends called her Jenny. Jenny Stanford was a large and tall woman, and to judge from her photographs, uncomfortable with her body, but her letters show off her mind. When she wrote to friends, even strangers, Jenny became loquacious and opinionated, literate and devout. She could not be chatty or trivial. Although her husband was nearly godless, except for the earthbound god of Mammon, and she knew it, Jenny’s letters talk often of her attempt to help God’s plan.