ROBERT SHLAER

American photographer Robert Shlaer is a particular individual with a grand determination to walk and follow his own intuition. For 20 years he has been investigating the western part of America, following the tracks of previous explorers carrying his camera all the time. His main intention was to recapture photographically the very same scenarios that were once frozen in time by previous photographers several years before.

Shaler had a particular aim to reinterpret specifically daguerreotypist artists that ventured these areas in the very beginning of photography, for him the daguerreotype was the form of commercialization of photography, the most appealing form of photography but not the most reliable.

Robert Shlaer at Beaumont Newhall's
 home in Santa Fe, 1993

“My first and greatest love remains the landscape,” he says, “so with a process as given to failure as daguerreotype, it is comforting to know that the subject will be there tomorrow for another try.”  (Coumbia College, 2012.)

Shaler was so deeply into this field that he took on a process of self-taught, where he himself had built the equipment needed to handle the toxic chemicals and the equipment for the development of the plates. The plates had been commissioned to be customized made by a commercial manufacturer. He projected himself as the only full time Daguerreotypist in the world, and sold many of his work to galleries. His major project was that of recreating the lost work of Daguerreotypist photographer Solomon Nunes Carvalho that at his time in 1853 was commissioned by the explorer John C. Fremont to photography his expedition in finding a route for the transcontinental that was viable.

Wetterhorn Peak, Colo., from the Forks of the Cimarron River, July 1996.

Coumbia College, 2012. Robert Shlaer ’63 Recreates History Through Daguerreotype. [online]

Available at: < http://www.college.columbia.edu/cct/fall12/alumni_profiles2> 
[Accessed 25 December 2013].