Golden Prospects: Daguerreotypes of the California Gold Rush. By Jane L. Aspinwall with Keith F. Davis. Foreword by Julián Zugazagoitia

Extract

In an essay recently published in this journal, Martha Sandweiss writes, “photographers and historians stand in fundamentally different relationships to their subjects. Historians are always looking back. Photographers are always picturing a present, albeit an evanescent one that slips away the moment the sensitized plate or film is exposed.” (“Seeing History: Thinking About and With Photographs,” Spring 2020, p. 4). In Golden Prospects Jane Aspinwall skillfully combines both perspectives, offering readers a valuable, often myth-busting scholarly history of the California Gold Rush as told by photographers capturing the evanescent present of those who lived it. 

The book (and accompanying exhibit touring the United States during 2019–20) brings together for the first time five hundred images sourced from thirty-three institutions in the United States and Canada, a remarkable research achievement on its own. Six chapters present the photographs organized by theme, from images of the urban gold rush in San Francisco and Sacramento to daguerreotypes that capture life in mining towns, technologies of mining, and the diversity of those who worked in the gold fields. Each chapter, all authored by Aspinwall save for one contributed by Keith F. Davis, examines the daguerreotypes and the photographers who made them and also analyzes the social, political, and cultural aspects of the Gold Rush scenes that those photographs depict.