Mineral Analogs: Carleton Watkins’s Photographs and the Gold Standard

A close reading of Carleton Watkins’s photograph Nugget of Gold—attending to its subject matter, production, display at a world’s fair, reproduction and circulation, and especially its minerality—reveals a profound identification in late nineteenth-century society in the United States between photography and mining. Representing a fusion of nature and culture, photography has been likened to currency almost from its inception. Yet the material and, specifically, the mineral limitations of this economy have been overlooked, though they establish a direct parallel with another gold-dependent commodity: money. Both were historically restricted by their analog quality; their proliferation, and hence their value, was limited by extractive labor and material substance.