In 1851, a few years after the start of California’s Gold Rush, an unknown photographer assembled their equipment on a small hill near the port of San Francisco. Working carefully in the bright afternoon light, they created a panoramic series of daguerreotypes depicting the waterfront neighborhood with its scenic natural backdrop. The resulting set of shadowy, bronze-tinted images comprises some of the earliest photos taken in the storied new state of California, and gave many curious Americans back east their first impressions of the city by the bay. While these daguerreotypes captured some of San Francisco’s most memorable quirks—yes, there are hills—they also revealed aspects of the young city that aren’t part of its legend, like the way urban and rural lifestyles intertwined on unpretentious blocks, or the drama of its wild, sandy bluffs overlooking a harbor packed with wooden vessels.“Who does the city belong to? What is it for?”
Today, millions of digital images are created and shared on a daily basis, but in the 1850s, a single daguerreotype took a skilled professional with expensive supplies considerable time to photograph and develop for display. The final image was unique, and could not be copied or reprinted. Relying on early photographs like these, the California Historical Society’s recent exhibition, “Boomtowns: How Photography Shaped Los Angeles and San Francisco” offers a detailed look at the formation of California’s two largest cities from the mid-19th to the early 20th centuries. (The show is on display through March 2019.)
Viewing such detailed early images of San Francisco and Los Angeles, cities famous across the globe, is like meeting a friend’s parents for the first time: The photos instantly deepen our understanding of these places and how they came to be. Taken together, the collection emphasizes the near-constant upheaval and seismic change both cities experienced during these decades and in the years since.
The exhibition opens with six surviving images from the panorama of San Francisco taken in 1851. Framed in brass mats, the photos are elusive, as the metallic sheen of their coated-glass surfaces makes the images invisible if not viewed from the perfect angle—one can only see a single section of the panorama at a time, a small slice of the mysterious city of San Francisco. These elusive images were likely shipped to the East Coast, where they would have gone on display for a paying public. (Individual daguerreotypes were typically held in one’s hands for viewing, so a panoramic wall-mounted view would have been a novelty to most viewers.)