Pioneer Photography in Bolivia

W Walcott, Frederick C. Walcott, an American scientist, visited the remote Laguna Colorada in the Sud Lipez province of the Potosí department in southwestern Bolivia in 1924. Eighteen photographs from that expedition, including what are thought to be the first ever made of the Laguna Colorada and environs, illustrate Walcott's "An Expedition to the Laguna Colorada, Southern Bolivia," Geographical Review (vol. XV, no. 3, July 1925).

Ward, Charles V., and Jacob C. Ward (1809-1891). Painters and daguerreotypists from Bloomfield, New Jersey, the Ward brothers made a three-year trip (1845 to 1848) to South America, visiting Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and, on their return home, Jamaica and Cuba. According to Hernán Rodríguez Villegas, they operated daguerreotype studios in Valparaíso and Santiago between 1845 and 1846, and in Copiapó in 1847. Keith McElroy, who has reviewed Lima newspapers of the era, reports that they opened a daguerreotype studio in Lima on 31 July 1847, claiming experience in the United States and Chile. They moved their studio to Callao in late November or early December 1847, returned to Lima in March 1848, and stopped advertising in the Lima newspapers after 15 April of that year. Vicente Gesualdo has them in Chile in 1848, going up to Bolivia from the Pacific coast that same year and taking pictures in La Paz, Oruro, and Sucre, apparently on their way to Peru and home. Gesualdo identifies the Ward brothers as the first daguerreotypists in Bolivia, predating Francisco Solano Ortega and Mariano Pablo Rosquellas. In 1848, Jacob Ward returned to his family and business in Bloomfield, where he died in 1891. What became of Charles Ward is unknown. Their daguerreotypes have not been located.

Witcomb, Alejandro S. (1835-1905). The imprint "A.S. Witcomb, Buenos Aires," appears on a late-19th-century cabinet card of a Bolivian subject. An English immigrant, Witcomb, opened a studio in Buenos Aires ca. 1861, purchased Christiano Jr.'s studio and negatives in 1878, and was active until the late 1890s. He died in Asunción, Paraguay, in 1905. His Bolivian travels, if any, are unknown. Witcomb's Buenos Aires studio was carried on by his son Alejandro and others until 1970. La Colección Witcomb is housed at the Archivo General de la Nación in Buenos Aires.

Wolff, E. See Mission Scientifique Française.

Wright, Marie Robinson (1866-1914). A Georgia native, Wright was married to Georgia supreme court justice Hinton P. Wright at eighteen and widowed at twenty. She then became a special correspondent for a New York newspaper. In the late 1890s, she began publishing a series of heavily illustrated octavo volumes of her travels to Latin America--Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Chile, and Bolivia. Whether she made her own photographs or not is unknown, but she did obtain numerous prints from local photographers. During her 1906 trip to Bolivia, Wright traveled more than a thousand miles by mule. Her Bolivia: The Central Highway of South America, a Land of Rich Resources and Varied Interest (1907), published in Spanish as Bolivia, el camino central, de Sur-América, una tierra de ricos recursos y de variado interés (1907),