1474
studio portraits. The sitters are posed as if working in
the Senate chamber. Liberian artist Robert K. Griffi n
used these images as studies for a watercolor painting
of the Senate he created in the mid 1850s. Washington
also worked outdoors, producing landscape views of
Monrovia that were published by the American Coloni-
zation Society. Unfortunately, these images are known
only through published engravings.
When business slowed in Liberia, Washington
traveled to Sierra Leone, Gambia, and Senegal to ply
his trade. Eventually, he exhausted his daguerreotype
supplies. He placed orders with suppliers in the United
States, but had to wait several months before he received
supplies, causing disruptions in business.
Despite his early success as a daguerreotypist in
Monrovia, Washington became convinced that the
only practical means of securing wealth, prosperity,
and political importance in Liberia lay in developing
the country’s agricultural resources. Washington estab-
lished a farm on the St. Paul River, twenty miles from
Monrovia, where he grew sugarcane and other crops.
At its peak, his farm employed more than fi fty workers.
He also held various positions in Liberia’s House and
Senate, including speaker.
Washington died in Monrovia, Liberia on 7 June
- At the time of his death, he was the owner and
editor of the New Era newspaper.
Approximately sixty-fi ve portrait daguerreotypes by
Augustus Washington are extant. His daguerreotypes
are in the collections of the Library of Congress, the
Connecticut Historical Society, and the Smithsonian
Institution, as well as many private collections.
Carol Johnson
Biography
Augustus Washington was born in 1820 or 1821 in Tren-
ton, New Jersey. He married Cordelia Aiken in 1850.
The couple had three children. Washington was one of
a small number of African American photographers to
work as a daguerreotypist in the middle of the nineteenth
century. He initially pursued photography in order to
fi nance his education, selling portraits while studying
at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. In
1846 he opened a successful daguerreotype studio in
Hartford, Connecticut, where his sitters included the
abolitionist John Brown. In 1852 he was awarded a
silver medal for his portraits from the Hartford County
Agricultural Society. The following year, Washington
and his family moved to Liberia, on the west coast of
Africa, where he continued to make daguerreotypes
until he established himself as a farmer, political fi gure,
and businessman. Washington died on 7 June 1875 in
Monrovia, Liberia.
See also: Daguerreotype.
Further Reading
Johnson, Carol, “Faces of Freedom: Portraits from the American
Colonization Society Collection.” The Daguerreian Annual,
1996, 264–278.
——, “Photographic Materials” in Gathering History : The Mar-
ian S. Carson Collection of Americana, Washington, D.C.:
Library of Congress, 1999.
Kernan, Michael, “A Durable Memento.” Smithsonian, 30, no.
2 (May 1999): 26–28.
Moses, Wilson Jeremiah, Liberian Dreams: Back–to Africa Nar-
ratives from the 1850s, University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1998.
Shumard, Ann, “Augustus Washington: African American Da-
guerreotypist” in Exposure, 35:2 (2002) 5–16.
——, A Durable Memento: Portraits by Augustus Washington
African American Daguerreotypist, Washington, D.C.: Smith-
sonian Institution Press, National Portrait Gallery, 1999.
Sullivan, George, Black Artists in Photography, 1840–1940, New
York: Cobblehill Books, 1996.
Willis, Deborah, Refl ections in Black: A History of Black Photog-
raphers 1840 to Present, New York: Norton, 2000.WATERHOUSE, JAMES (1842–1922)
James Waterhouse was a career soldier who made
signifi cant contributions in a number of technical and
historical areas of photography. He was an industrious
writer who combined a desire to innovate with aesthetic
awareness and an antiquarian’s sensibility. His keenness
to explore unusual avenues was tempered by a readiness
to retract when they turned out to be cul-de-sacs. He
showed a willingness to go back to fi rst principles to
learn lessons of contemporary relevance, as with his ex-
amination of the daguerreotype process. His reputation
has not endured for a number of reasons: the specialised
nature of the subjects he scrutinised; because many of
his articles were published in India and did not achieve
a wide circulation; and because his fi ndings were often
incorporated into the research of later historians without
appropriate attribution.
Waterhouse began his military training at the East
India Company’s Addiscombe College, where he was
probably introduced to photography. Most of his service
was spent in India as Assistant Surveyor-General. Part
of the work of the Survey of India was concerned with
making the production of maps and engineering plans
more effi cient, and Waterhouse researched improved
techniques of photo-mechanical reproduction, as de-
scribed in Charles Black’s 1891 overview of the work
of the Indian Surveys.
In 1878 Waterhouse toured European photographic
laboratories, notably the Military Geographical Institute
in Vienna, augmenting his fi ndings with his own experi-
ments, as a result of which he introduced improvements
in photo-collotype and photolithography. In 1882 he
developed a heliogravure technique for producing half-
tone prints. In 1887, after another visit to Vienna, he
introduced a photo-etching process that was a great im-