Page 42 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 42/206
George Catlin: Indian Gallery from 1839
Although Dancer was inventing these daguerreotypes (micrographs - that could only be viewed properly with a microscope) as early as 1839, and although he developed his technique during the 1840s, and adopted the Scott Archer Wet Collodion plate instead of the Daguerreotype after 1851, his discovery of the 160:1 size-reduction ratios (that he achieved back then) was not applicably relevant in 1839. Despite this, the real value of the microphotograph - or microfilm as it became known - was not realised until the 20th century, in the face of the massive increase in the amount of paperwork or documentation and the resulting document-processing as the mechanisation of industry and banking progressed. Microfilm and sheets of related micro-photographs called micro-fiche where still in use in the late 20th century - as catalogues of car spares for example, or as a stills catalogue in a film- museum.
“In 1841 Catlin published Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians, in two volumes, with about 300 engravings. Three years later he published 25 plates, entitled Catlin's North American Indian Portfolio, and, in 1848, Eight Years' Travels and Residence in Europe. From 1852 to 1857 he traveled through South and Central America and later returned for further exploration in the Far West. The record of these later years is contained in Last Rambles amongst the Indians of the Rocky Mountains and the Andes (1868) and My Life among the Indians (ed. by N. G. Humphreys, 1909). In 1872, Catlin traveled to Washington, D.C. at the invitation of Joseph Henry, the first secretary of the Smithsonian. Until his death later that year in Jersey City, New Jersey, Catlin worked in a studio in the Smithsonian "Castle." Harrison's widow donated the original Indian Gallery-more than 500 works-to the Smithsonian in 1879.” (https://www.georgecatlin.org)
The great collection of Catlin’s portraits in now in the Smithsonian. George Catlin is portrayed fictionally in Larry MacMurtry’s epic 4-volume adventure The Berrybender Narratives (2011) set in the 1830s, which gives some valuable context for his adventures among the Plains Indians in the then relatively unexplored American West - still ‘wild’ in the truest sense, but rapidly changing, as first trappers, hunters and explorers then farmers, ranchers and settlers migrated West. Catlin’s work is one of the first great ethnological-art expeditions, preceding Gottfried Landauer’s Maori at Home portraits of the 1880s, and Edward Sherriff Curtis’ great photographic study The North American Indian begun in 1907. Catlin seems to have had the overwhelming desire to preserve the memory of these original American nations of which some 574 still survive in the 21st century. Indeed MacMurtry’s books are great descriptions of the wonder of the wild wilderness of the Pains, and the men who realised how honoured they were to be among the first Westerners to see these beauties - and within a decade or two to realise that they would also be the last to experience them.