Panama

1918 · réf. List2982 — Peru and Panama 1918. Approximately 364 photos; album and unmounted photos silver prints cyanotypes and printing-out-paper prints. Photos measure 3 x 4 to 8 x 10 inches with about half measuring 3 x 5 ½ inches. Some with photographer’s hand-stamp or credit in pencil; others with manuscript notations verso or recto; some captions to album pages. Offered in partnership with Daniel / Oliver. Rich and extensive photographic archive of Walton T. Burres of Stockton California showing his time in Peru c. 1904 as an amateur explorer and doctor for the Inca Mining and Rubber Company and his later work in Panama c. 1918 with the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Health Division.The collection consists of a large number of loose photos acquired by the gallery in 2021 and a recently discovered photo album showing some of the same subjects and containing a few duplicate images some printed in different sizes or formats as well as hundreds of previously unseen prints. Together this material makes up the largest extant archive of Burres’s photographic work. Though his work was published at the time both in Peruvian and American publications much of it was lost when he dropped it in a river that he was attempting to ford. Burres was educated at California’s Cooper Medical College the first school of medicine on the West Coast and was a prominent member of the Stockton community before sojourning to Peru around 1900 to help the Inca Mining and Rubber Company address the deadly diseases endemic to the region such as malaria and yellow fever. To encourage economic infrastructure in remote areas the Peruvian government began granting land concessions to any company that would build roads bridges or river ports. As a result the Inca Mining Company an American outfit based in Tirapata purchased the rights to mine gold along the upper Inambari River in 1896 and soon became the richest gold producer in Peru. A large portion of Burres’s Peruvian images document his 1903–1904 excursion from Arequipa 150 miles into “rubber country.” The journeys were well-recounted in U.S. papers and a number of the anecdotes described in print are seen in the present images. There are many dynamic views of Burres and his party trekking through the dense jungle and summiting the high mountains as well as shots of flora fauna and native Peruvians. Burres’s travel companions for this trip included the famed adventurer Harriet Chalmers Adams later dubbed “America’s greatest woman explorer” by the New York Times. Adams and her husband Frank both fellow Stocktonians joined up with Burres during their own multi-year expedition through South America. There are a number of portraits of a woman who bears a striking resemblance to Adams though it is possibly another person. Other Peruvian material includes numerous views of Cusco Arequipa and the surrounding environs including a beautiful interior of a chapel a Martin Chambi-esque detail shot of a stone wall and portraits of local townspeople some identified as Quechua people. There are a number of lush large-format cyanotypes rich printing-out-paper views and many handsome small-format panoramas. These were printed on Inca Mining Company surplus stationary which speaks to the makeshift nature of photo-development under the circumstances. One particularly striking image shows the top of Misti volcano barely visible above the clouds. This image was reproduced in Burres's account of his travels published in 1909 in Outing magazine. The photographs from Burres’s time in Panama document his more serious work as a virologist and health administrator in the area. One interesting photo shows a pair of recently-shot iguanas with a caption noting that “blood of these reptiles was found infected with Haemogregarina.” Another image is that of a new style of privy built from concrete and wire-mesh designed to better keep out rain water. There are also keenly-shot views of main streets and local culture in Los Santos Chiriquí and elsewhere including a number of humanistic group portraits taken at a girl’s school. unknown