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CLASS NOTES
COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY
COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY
CLASS NOTES
Robert Shlaer ’63 Recreates
History Through Daguerreotype
Though he was born
and educated on the
East Coast, Robert
Shlaer ’63, ’66 GSAS
is a westerner at heart. Sure,
he looks the part, with his thick
beard, flannel shirt and suspenders,
but it runs deeper than
that. Shlaer is a westerner in
that older, more romantic sense
of the word: He’s an individualist,
determined to carve out his
own path wherever it may lead.
And sometimes it leads to
someone else’s path. For nearly
two decades, Shlaer has been
exploring America’s western
landscape with a camera in tow,
retracing the steps of the great
explorers of centuries past. He
B y Justin DeFreita s
has sought both to recreate and
expand on the work of the pioneering
artists and daguer re otype
photographers who documented
these 19th-century expeditions,
capturing the same vistas that
were once framed in the viewfinders
of his predecessors.
Shlaer considers daguerreotype
— the silvery images that
reigned from 1839–60 as the
first commercially viable form of
photography — to be “the most
beautiful of all forms of photography.”
But it’s hardly the most
reliable. “My first and greatest
love remains the landscape,” he
says, “so with a process as given
to failure as daguerreotypy, it
is comforting to know that the
Self-portrait in Cathedral Valley, Capitol Reef National Park, Utah, May 1998.
subject will be there tomorrow
for another try.”
Shlaer was born in Manhattan
and raised in New Mexico,
where his father, Simon Shlaer
’24, ’37 GSAS, was an engineer
at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
By Shlaer’s own admission,
his academic career was an
exercise in expedience. Though
his family put a premium on
education, Shlaer applied to the
College more because it made
its admissions decisions earlier
than other schools. “I figured
that if I got accepted, I wouldn’t
have to put any effort into applying
elsewhere,” he says.
He started out studying physics
but became disenchanted
and made a late switch to art
history, primarily because it was
the only degree that could be
completed in two years. Later,
he pursued a master’s in experimental
psychology at Columbia
in part, he says, as a means of
avoiding the draft, then moved
on to thesis work in neurophysiology
at Rochester before earning
a Ph.D. in neurophysiology
and sensory psychology from
Chicago in 1971.
For a few years Shlaer continued
in academia, working as
a researcher and lecturer in the
Department of Neurosurgery at
Northwestern University Medical
School, but he struggled
with the desire for a different
career. It was an “escapist
fantasy” that had crystallized
during his tenure
at Columbia, when he
had seen an exhibit of
works by Ansel Adams at
the Museum of Modern
Art. Adams’ imagery invoked
a longing in Shlaer
to wander and document
the western landscape.
In the mid-1970s, newly
inspired by a quote from
Adams in which he declared
the daguerreotype
the benchmark against
which he measured his
own creations, Shlaer
decided to take up the
moribund medium.
Shlaer immersed himself
in the craft, embarking
on a project of selfeducation.
He ordered
customized plates from
a commercial manufacturer
and hand-built the
necessary equipment for
preparing and developing
them and for handling
the toxic chemicals the
process requires. (In
daguerreotypy, an image
is captured on a polished
and chemically treated
layer of silver atop a
copper plate and must be
developed in short order
by exposing the plate to
mercury vapors.) After
six months of refining his
technique, Shlaer left his
academic life behind and
returned to New Mexico,
determined to make his
living as a daguerreotypist.
He quickly realized,
however, that he didn’t
have the money or the
facilities to get his new
career off the ground.
What followed was an
extended period of peripatetic
employment that
included tutoring at St.
John’s College in Santa Fe
as well as an eight-year
stint crafting and selling
custom woodwind instruments.
By the mid-1980s Shlaer
finally felt that he had everything
he needed to make
a go of it. He promoted
himself as “The World’s
Only Full-Time Professional
Daguerreotypist” and sold
his work in local galleries
before beginning the project
that would become
his magnum opus: the
recreation of the lost daguerreotypes
of Solomon Nunes
Carvalho, the young photographer
hired by famed explorer
John C. Frémont to document
his final expedition, in 1853, in
search of a viable central route
for a transcontinental railroad.
Though Carvalho’s plates
were lost in a warehouse fire in
1881, many of his images had
been copied by engravers for
use as illustrations in a book
Frémont was planning. Shlaer
was intrigued by the idea of
recreating them in their original
form, a project that combined
all of his talents and passions:
the delicate daguerreotyping
process called upon his scientific
and technical skills, the
photography itself summoned
the artist in him and the exacting
research not only made use
of his art history background
but also provided an outlet for
his admittedly obsessive nature.
Shlaer outfitted his minivan
as a mobile laboratory and
Wetterhorn Peak, Colo., from the Forks of the Cimarron River, July 1996.
PHOTOS: ROBERT SHLAER ’63, ’66 GSAS
began retracing Frémont’s
route, tracking down every site
that Carvalho photographed.
“I was able to find all of the
scenes in the engravings and
redaguerreotype them,” Shlaer
says. “I filled in the rest of
the expedition from surviving
written descriptions, from my
knowledge of the route and
from my imagination, which I
attempted to synchronize with
that of Frémont and Carvalho.”
“Bob’s a remarkable person,”
says John Morton, a retired
chemistry professor from Western
New Mexico University and
longtime friend of Shlaer. Morton
is himself a photographer,
his interest having begun with
his study of old photographic
processes. But Morton has
never attempted daguerreotypy.
“Too rich for my blood,” he says.
“It’s very expensive and very
difficult.”
Morton testifies to Shlaer’s
perfectionism. “If a daguerreotype
turns out poorly he’ll wipe
it off the plate,” Morton says.
“I’ve seen him wipe away images
I would have been proud to
have caught.”
Shlaer explains himself differently.
“I lack self-discipline,” he
says, arguing that the singleminded
focus with which he
pursues his passions is more
vice than virtue. “It’s just another
form of excess.”
Shlaer’s “excess” resulted
in a book, Sights Once Seen:
Daguerreotyping Frémont’s Last
Expedition Through the Rockies,
which recreates Carvalho’s lost
imagery and provides a lucid
and thoroughly researched account
of Frémont’s expedition,
correcting the historical record
of a journey that had generated
much myth and misinformation
during the preceding century
and a half. Shlaer spent four
years researching the expedition
in archives across the
country and photographing the
images out west. He spent another
year writing the book and
preparing a museum exhibition
that traveled the country for
five years. “It was the culmination
of my career,” Shlaer says.
But he’s not finished. His
current project has him photographing
another western trek,
that of topographic sketch artist
Richard Kern, who created the
first visual documentation of
the Rocky Mountains as part of
the Gunnison Expedition, which
also took place in 1853. Shlaer
is using conventional photography
this time, and the result
will be another book, this one
due in 2013. “When asked my
occupation, I now call myself
a ‘visual historian of western
exploration,’” Shlaer says. “And
if pressed further I add, ‘specializing
in the year 1853.’”
To see more photographs by
Shlaer, go to Web Extras at
college.columbia.edu/cct.
Justin DeFreitas is a Bay Area
writer, editor and cartoonist.
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