Author Description

'Gold and Silver' offers a contemporary insight into an exclusive archive of the California Gold Rush kept by the Cana- dian Photography Institute at the National Gallery of Canada (donated by the Archive of Modern Conflicts). Young 19th-century prospectors look at the camera, defying all the conventions of portraiture. Everything in these pictures their attitudes, their stares, their clothes deviates from the usual representations attached to daguerreotype photography. These portraits are accompanied by a series of landscapes photographs, also printed on metal; together, they reveal a pioneering iconography of the American landscape that stresses the human use of the land.