The photographic process may depend on silver, but a new exhibit shows how gold — specifically, its discovery in California 170 years ago this week — was just as important as a subject for daguerreotypes. During the later half of the 19th century, gold fever was as intense — and short lived — as the nascent photographic process.

Gold and Silver: Images and Illusions of the Gold Rush, on view through April 2 at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, with a book co-published by the Canadian Photography Institute and RVB Books, explores the symbolism and materiality of precious metals: as a stabilizing element within the history of photography, and holding the promise of prosperity that shaped America.

When gold was discovered in San Francisco in 1848, it set off a frenzy. News spread rapidly, and by 1849 the prospectors who descended upon California were dubbed “forty-niners.” Gold was there for the taking, without need for licenses or tax payments. California was not even a state: it belonged to Mexico, despite being occupied by U.S. troops. The west was full of swindlers and gangsters; it attracted men with a propensity for ruthlessness and greed. The lawless terrain belonged only to those who exploited it (if at the expense of the indigenous people), and photographs doubled as a primitive land registry. Boomtowns sprang up, thrived, then emptied out when the land could no longer be exploited.

Around the same time, the daguerreotype enjoyed a similar surge in popularity. Invented in France by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, the process utilized a silvered copper plate onto which a richly detailed image could appear. Its sensitivity to light made it at once highly conducive yet incredibly fragile. A gold bath gave it stability and the possibility of longevity.

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The perception of the daguerreotype differed sharply on each side of the Atlantic. The medium was considered scientific in France, since mechanized precision was deemed inferior to the idealized art of painting. But it was seen as a democratizing and theatrical tool in the United States. Portraits, once only for the wealthy, were suddenly accessible to all, and could be leveraged to present the illusion of social standing. “The bourgeois wanted to look like the aristocrat,” noted Luce Lebart, director of the Canadian Photography Institute and author of “Gold and Silver.”

But the way the portraits were staged soon shifted from prim to provocative. The pioneers of the Gold Rush, with hardness in their eyes and pickaxes over their shoulders, used an antithetical approach to flaunt a higher social standing. Affluence had new iconography; the aristocrat gave way to the bandit, equipped with his aggressive toolkit: pistols, knives, and shovels.

“When one thinks how much weapons have — and continue to — characterize American cinema or TV series,” Ms. Lebart noted, “these images form an archaeology of the American imagination.”

These figures epitomized the American Dream: starting over from nothing, powered simply by an appetite for wealth attained quickly through bold actions and sheer luck. The sitters look not only subversively defiant, but disarmingly modern. Indeed, from the debonair foulards and manicured beards to the wide-brim hats, the men conjure a certain Brooklyn demographic.

“The appearance of these argonauts is sometimes so close to that of contemporary hipsters that the viewer is almost perplexed,” Ms. Lebart acknowledged. “The images seem very contemporary through the poses, the hairstyles, the allure, and even the clothes.”

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Also easily confused as contemporaneous: the manual retouching on the images. Photographers of the period embellished images with bronzine, a copper-and-bronze mix, to highlight accessories like boutonnières or watches, and to gild frames, almost anticipating graphic design practices. Despite the heightened aesthetics of the images, the motivation behind them was never intentionally artistic. Images were kept in the family, often as a mantelpiece aide-memoire for faraway loved ones.

The discovery of gold in Dawson City in 1896 reignited a fresh fervor for thousands of prospectors in mountainous northwest Canada. The city was named after George Mercer Dawson, a geologist and photographer who made images of the Yukon a decade before the territory was transformed by greed.

In the nearly 50 years between these two gold rushes, photography changed drastically: from one-off images on metal to reproducible images on glass or paper. The range of subjects expanded. Charlie Chaplin saw images by Eric A. Hegg — the most famous of which shows prospectors climbing along the U.S./Canada border at the Chilkoot Pass — which in turn inspired his 1925 movie “The Gold Rush.” He recreated the astonishing scene of a succession of men crossing the brutal terrain to satisfy their Eldorado appetites.

The collection of images, culled from 11,000 daguerreotypes donated to the National Gallery of Canada’s Canadian Photography Institute, is especially powerful because it disrupts common thinking about photography history. This is true formally — “the technology of the daguerreotype was incredible; the sharpness is barely equaled today,” Ms. Lebart said — and emblematically. “This archive is striking because these images, which are very old, do not correspond to the ideas we have of ‘old’ photographs: dusty, yellowing, boring.”

The radical nature of early photography deserves greater recognition, Ms. Lebart stressed. “Our perception of the ‘old photo’ is backwards. Historical photos are thought of as ‘old’ when, in reality, they are ‘young.’ They are the youth of the medium,” she noted. “We are old.”

“Gold and Silver” is organized by the Canadian Photography Institute in partnership with Library and Archives Canada, with a gift of “The Origins of Photography” from the Archive of Modern Conflict.



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