In the biting chill of a Rocky Mountain winter in 1853, as snowdrifts swallowed wagons and starvation clawed at the bones of his companions, Solomon Nunes Carvalho knelt in the frost, his hands trembling not just from cold but from the delicate alchemy of mercury vapors and silver plates.
At 38 years old, this Sephardic Jewish artist from Charleston, South Carolina, was no ordinary traveler. He was a pioneer wielding one of the 19th century’s most fragile technologies: the daguerreotype camera. Amid the howling winds of what would become one of the most disastrous expeditions in American history, Carvalho captured images that would etch the untamed West into the national imagination – portraits of stoic Native American chiefs, sprawling Cheyenne villages, and the rugged faces of explorers pushing toward a transcontinental dream. His work didn’t just document the landscape; it helped forge it, proving that photography could endure the wilds as boldly as any frontiersman.
Solomon Nunes Carvalho (1815-1897) was a man of contradictions: a devout Jew observing Shabbat amid godless prairies, a refined portraitist trading easel for tripod, an inventor whose gadgets tamed light in ways that foreshadowed modern imaging.
Born into a family of exiles fleeing the Portuguese Inquisition, he embodied the restless spirit of 19th-century America. His contributions to photography were seismic – not in solitary genius, but in grit-fueled adaptation. He hauled cumbersome gear across 2,400 miles of uncharted territory, innovated field techniques under duress, and produced some of the earliest visual records of the American West. Yet, like many daguerreotypes exposed to time’s relentless light, much of his legacy faded into obscurity, to be rediscovered today.
We try to tell the story of how one man’s lens illuminated the shadows of expansionism, blending art, science and survival in a flash of silver iodide.
To understand Carvalho’s photographic fire, one must trace it back to the embers of persecution. Born on April 27, 1815, in Charleston, South Carolina, Solomon was the scion of a storied Sephardic lineage. His ancestors had escaped the flames of the Inquisition in 17th-century Portugal, finding refuge in Amsterdam, then London, before anchoring in the New World in 1811.
Solomon’s father, David Nunes Carvalho, a hazzan (cantor) and silversmith, co-founded Charleston’s Reformed Society of Israelites in 1825 – one of the earliest attempts at Reform Judaism in America, blending tradition with Enlightenment ideals. Young Solomon grew up in this crucible of faith and innovation, reciting prayers in Ladino while the humid air buzzed with the hum of his father’s workshop.
By 1840, the family had relocated to Philadelphia, a hub of Jewish intellectual life where Solomon’s artistic talents blossomed. Family lore holds that he apprenticed under the renowned portraitist Thomas Sully during the painter’s extended stay in the city from November 1841 to March 1842, honing skills in oil on canvas that would later infuse his photographic eye with dramatic chiaroscuro.
At just 25, Solomon completed “Child with Rabbits,” a tender yet masterful depiction of innocence that caught the eye of engravers. The painting was reproduced on national bank notes, including those issued by Georgia’s Planters Mechanics Bank in 1855 and the Omaha City Bank and Loan in 1858, making Carvalho’s brushstrokes legal tender across the growing republic.
But art was more than aesthetics for Carvalho; it was communal glue. On October 15, 1845, he married Sarah Miriam Solis in Philadelphia, their union officiated by the influential rabbi Isaac Leeser. The couple settled in Baltimore by 1850 with their young children, David and Charity, where Solomon threw himself into Jewish institution-building.
He co-founded the Beth Israel Sephardic synagogue and the Baltimore Hebrew English Sunday School, institutions that bridged Old World rituals with New World aspirations. This dual life – artist by trade, pillar by faith – would sustain him through the trials ahead, reminding him that creation, whether in paint or plate, was a divine act.
Photography burst onto the scene in 1839 when Louis Daguerre unveiled his eponymous process: a silver-plated copper sheet sensitized with iodine vapor, exposed in a camera obscura, and developed over heated mercury to yield a mirror-like positive image. It was finicky, expensive, and confined to studios, but its precision captivated the middle class, democratizing portraiture like never before.
Carvalho entered this revolution early, training in his father’s Philadelphia workshop by age 19 and opening his own Baltimore gallery in June 1849. There, he offered a tantalizing menu: oil portraits for the elite, daguerreotypes for the aspiring masses. Branches soon sprouted in Charleston, Philadelphia and New York, where by 1853, Carvalho was a fixture in the burgeoning photographic scene.
What set him apart? Innovation born of necessity. Daguerreotypes demanded a glass cover to protect the delicate surface, adding bulk and fragility. Carvalho devised a transparent enamel coating that sealed the image airtight, eliminating the need for glass and making portraits more portable and resilient – ideal for a mobile America. He also refined chemical formulas to accelerate development, a boon for impatient sitters. These tweaks weren’t mere tweaks; they were steps toward photography’s liberation from the studio, foreshadowing the portable cameras that would define the 20th century.
Carvalho’s portraits captured the era’s soul: stern merchants, wide-eyed children, and even communal leaders like Leeser. But it was his landscapes – rare for daguerreotypists – that hinted at wanderlust. A self-portrait from this period shows a man with piercing eyes and a neatly trimmed beard, gazing not at the lens but into some distant horizon, as if already plotting his escape from the easel.
The call came in 1853 from Colonel John C. Frémont, the “Pathfinder” of the West and a senator eyeing the presidency. Congress had greenlit the Pacific Railroad Surveys to scout routes for a steel spine across the continent. Frémont, tasked with the 38th parallel “central route,” needed a visual chronicler. Enter Carvalho, whose reputation for cold-weather chemistry made him the man for the job.
The expedition launched from New York, chugging by rail to St. Louis, then steaming up the Missouri River to Westport, Kansas Territory (modern Kansas City). From there, 35 men, 200 mules, and wagons groaning under supplies plunged into the unknown: Kansas prairies, Colorado badlands, Utah deserts. Carvalho’s kit weighed a backbreaking 100 pounds – camera obscura, mercury flasks, iodine crystals, polishing tools – all lashed to a mule amid dust storms and buffalo herds.
He exposed nearly 300 plates over six months, a prodigious output. Daily rituals: sensitizing plates by candlelight, 20-minute exposures for landscapes (shorter for portraits, with head braces to still fidgety subjects), and mercury fuming in a portable dark tent that doubled as a sauna in summer and icebox in winter. His subjects were a rogues’ gallery of the frontier: grizzled mountain men like Kit Carson’s ilk, pioneers with sun-leathered faces, and Native Americans who approached the “medicine box” with wary curiosity.
One gem survives: a daguerreotype of a Cheyenne village at Big Timbers, Kansas Territory, copied by Mathew Brady into a wet-plate negative now housed at the Library of Congress. Tepees cluster like sentinels along the Arkansas River, figures blurred in motion – a smoky testament to communal life on the eve of displacement. Another lost original, but vividly described, portrayed Ute Chief Walkara (or Wakara), the “Hawk of the Mountains,” whose fierce gaze and feathered headdress commanded respect. Carvalho’s rapport with tribes stemmed from mutual intrigue; he traded tobacco for poses, capturing dignity amid encroaching steel.
Disaster struck in December 1853. Frémont, overconfident, ordered a winter crossing of the Rockies via a high pass. Blizzards buried the party; mules starved, men gnawed boot leather. Carvalho, frostbitten and scurvy-riddled, collapsed, his chemicals freezing mid-process. “The snow was waist-deep, the cold piercing to the marrow,” he later wrote. Topographer Frederick W. von Egloffstein hauled him to safety, but the expedition splintered. Frémont pressed to California; Carvalho and Egloffstein, near death, were rescued by Mormon settlers in Parowan, Utah.
In Salt Lake City, Brigham Young nursed them back – ironic, given Frémont’s anti-Mormon bent. Carvalho, ever the bridge-builder, befriended Young, sketching his portrait and attending synagogue services in a city of saints. He reached Los Angeles by spring 1854, where he helped organize the Hebrew Benevolent Society, Judaism’s first foothold in California. Back East, tragedy: a fire devoured most plates. Survivors, entrusted to Brady, mingled anonymously in his Civil War oeuvre, their origins obscured.
Yet Carvalho didn’t mourn in silence. He painted from memory: Frémont in buckskin, Wakara in regalia, the serpentine Colorado River cleaving red rock canyons. These oils, exhibited in his galleries, brought the West to urban parlors, fueling railroad fever.
Carvalho’s true genius lay in adaptation. Daguerreotypy hated the cold – mercury froze at 37°F (2.778° Celsius), iodine crystals clumped. He jury-rigged heaters from expedition lamps, pre-warmed tents with body heat, and diluted chemicals for faster reactions, enabling exposures in sub-zero gales. His enamel patent (circa 1850s) wasn’t expedition-specific but amplified his field prowess, protecting plates from prairie grit.
These hacks set precedents. Pre-Carvalho, expedition art was sketchpads and watercolors – static, subjective. His daguerreotypes injected verisimilitude, influencing later survey photographers like Timothy O’Sullivan in the 1860s. As one historian notes, Carvalho “established a model for photographic documentation as an integral part of scientific reporting,” turning images into evidence for congressional debates on rails and routes.
Post-expedition, Carvalho’s star dimmed but never extinguished. His 1857 memoir, “Incidents of Travel and Adventure in the Far West; with Col. Frémont’s Last Expedition,” wove diary entries into a bestseller, possibly timed for Frémont’s 1856 presidential run (he lost to Buchanan). The book brimmed with anecdotes: bartering with Comanches, debating theology with Mormons, the terror of avalanches. It humanized the West, countering Frémont’s heroic gloss.
The Civil War scattered his focus; cataracts clouded his vision by 1869, blinding him fully by the 1880s. Undaunted, he pivoted to invention, patenting steam superheaters in 1877 and 1878 – devices that boosted locomotive efficiency, earning a Medal of Excellence from New York’s American Institute. In retirement, he penned an unpublished treatise reconciling Darwinian evolution with Genesis, a final fusion of science and scripture.
Carvalho died on May 21, 1897, in Pleasantville, New York, at 82, buried in Queens’ Beth Olam Cemetery beside his wife Sarah, who predeceased him. His son David carried the torch as a forensic handwriting expert, aiding cases from Arthur Conan Doyle’s circle to the Dreyfus Affair (though unsuccessfully).
Rediscovery came late. Utah honors him with plaques at Emigration Canyon and Wild Horse Butte, saluting his “enduring spirit.” The 2015 documentary “Carvalho’s Journey,” narrated by Michael Stuhlbarg, resurrects his plates via modern daguerreotypist recreations, airing on PBS to acclaim. Exhibitions, like Princeton’s 2016 “By Dawn’s Early Light,” showcase his hybrid oeuvre – paintings and photos as twin testaments to a vanishing frontier.
Today, as drones and satellites map our world, Carvalho reminds us: photography’s power lies not in perfection, but in persistence. In freezing tents and forgotten fires, he proved the image could conquer chaos, capturing not just scenes, but stories – of a Jew on the trail, a nation on the move, and an art form on the cusp of infinity. His shutter clicked open a door to the West; through it, we still glimpse the wild heart of America.