Silver Pacific

An engaging and beautifully illustrated history of early Western American photography and its wide-ranging mining economyMercury, silver, and gold—three essential elements necessary to early photography—were all discovered in present-day California and Nevada within a few years of photography’s invention in 1839, giving rise to mass settlement in the region. Silver Pacific analyzes mining photographs of the period alongside the economic and social drivers of their makers’ practices, showing how the networked economies of the transpacific played an important role in the creation of these objects and the development of the nation.Drawing on original research in more than twenty archives and collections spanning the Americas from Canada to Chile, Monica Bravo reconsiders the early history of photography from the perspective of materials, labor, and trade. She traces how the same mined commodities used in photography circulated to trade partners around the Pacific Rim. She describes how miners and photographers, together with other migratory workers, followed routes virtually identical to those of trade, linking together the Western United States with Chile, China, Hawaiʻi, Hong Kong, Japan, and Mexico. Bravo shows how the legacy of the mining photograph has contemporary resonances in Silicon Valley, whose name derives from silica, a raw material essential to digital photography.Broadening the geographies commonly associated with American photography, Silver Pacific sheds critical light on how transpacific capitalism gave rise to new visual economies in the late nineteenth-century Western United States.