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Group portrait of workshop participants, held at the Colorado Historical Society, Denver.

The turn of the century brings an abundance of "look-back" endeavors. One of the more unusual is Robert Shlaer's re-photographing of the first photographically documented expedition in the West, John Charles Fremont's 1853 journey from Kansas City to Utah.

A search for a central route for a transcontinental railroad, the Fremont expedition was recorded with a daguerreotype camera, using polished copper plates, gaseous chemicals and long exposure times, and that's what the photographer used 147 years later.

Shlaer also did painstaking research in libraries, museums and archives to find the exact spot from which the original daguerreotypes were taken for his replication. "Things got out of hand very quickly when I started doing the research. One thing always led to another," he laughed.

He found that U.S. 50 is along much of the route, though not necessarily on it. Many of the daguerreotypes are in Colorado - Bent's Old Fort, the Gunnison River near Dominguez Canyon, "Valley of the Sah-watch leading to Cochetope Pass," Sheep Mountain from High Mesa, and many more.

"The daguerreotype is the most beautiful form of photography. As you turn a daguerreotype in the light, it has an iridescent, dynamic appearance not seen in paper prints." Shlaer said in a telephone interview from his Santa Fe home.

"Everything since then has evolved away from beauty to ease of photography."

One hundred of Shlaer's daguerreotypes and a few of the 19thcentury images made from the original 1853 daguerreotypes are being shown in Santa Fe at the Palace of Governors on The Plaza through Sept. 12. Most of the 1853 daguerreotypes taken by Solomon Nunes Carvalho were destroyed by fire many years ago.

The show is called "Sights Once Seen: Daguerreotyping Fremont's Last Expedition Through the Rockies," as is the $45 book released by Museum of New Mexico Press in March. The hardcover book features 126 color daguerreotype photographs by Shlaer, and 33 halftones, maps and historical journal entries from members of the expedition.

There may be fewer than 50 daguerreotypists in the world today, and Shlaer considers himself the "world's only full-time, professional daguerreotypist." He took his first daguerreotype, a self-portrait, in 1973 while in Chicago, but it wasn't until he returned to New Mexico in 1986 that he could undertake the demanding photography full time.

"You have to do all sorts of fiddling to make daguerreotype work," he said, and he enjoys that tinkering. He photographed all the traditional daguerreotype subjects - the moon, solar eclipses, nudes, lightning, cave interiors and portraits, but landscapes are his favorite. His work may be seen at the Andrew Smith Gallery in Santa Fe. The Fremont show is scheduled for the Colorado Springs History Museum in two years, he said.

It took Shlaer almost four years to replicate the Fremont journey: "I was chased about a lot by the weather," he said. Since a typical landscape exposure could take from 10 seconds to a full minute, weather was of paramount importance.

Much to his surprise and pleasure Shlaer found that many things were better today than in 1853.

"No major railroad routes followed the Fremont Trail, so no big town sprung up ... only Grand Junction, and that's not a big city," he explained.
(an excerpt from the Denver Post)

Sights Once Seen: Daguerreotyping Frémont's Last Expedition Through The Rockies, now on exhibit at the U.S. Department of the Interior Museum, features more than one hundred contemporary daguerreotypes of western landscapes by Robert Shlaer.

Following the route traveled by explorer John Charles Frémont's expedition 150 years ago, Shlaer--a modern-day practitioner of this early form of photography--has visually reconstructed Frémont's quest for a central transcontinental railroad route. Fire destroyed all but 34 of the daguerreotypes Solomon N. Carvalho made during Frémont's 1853 expedition.

Several copies of engravings made from Carvalho's images also are displayed in the exhibition. Sights Once Seen is on loan from the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe, and continues at The Interior Museum through Monday, March 31, 2003.

Frémont and his men encountered treacherous, icy weather on their winter expedition. Temperatures remained below zero degrees Fahrenheit for much of their trek through the Rocky Mountains.

These conditions posed particular challenges for Carvalho, as daguerreotypy involves exposing silver-coated copper plates to gaseous chemicals for an extended period of time, and rinsing the plates in distilled water before gilding or tinting. Also, the equipment used to make daguerreotypes was cumbersome and heavy for the pack animals to transport.

In the 1990s, Shlaer's challenges were not frigid temperatures or bulky equipment but piecing together the historic route, from maps, expedition documents, and Carvalho's journal, and documenting its panoramic scenes. The resulting images (of the Santa Fe Trail and the Arkansas River Valley in Kansas, Colorado's Cochetopa Pass, and Cathedral Valley, Utah, for example) are a beautiful record of landscape, arduous exploration, and technical mastery.

Charles Bennett, the exhibition's curator, remarked, "If you've never seen daguerreotypes you will be amazed at the simultaneous clarity and ghost-like quality of this earliest form of photography."

In 1994, Shlaer chose to travel and photograph Frémont's Fifth Expedition route rather than to pursue a career in sensory psychology and neurophysiology, a field in which he earned a Ph.D. More than four years later he completed his task and began producing the exhibition. He authored a book by the same title (published by the Museum of New Mexico Press) that reproduces many of the images on exhibit at the Interior Museum. He has lectured and published widely on daguerreotypy, and his work is included in the collections of The Amon Carter Museum, The Boston Athenaeum, and The Huntington Library, among many others.
(DOI)