ABSTRACT
The daguerreotype spread throughout North America because of powerhouses of production, which Beaumont Newhall has identified as springing up during the early 1840s in Philadelphia, New York and Boston. Despite being British by birth, Newland was a product of the relatively uncurbed diffusion and the liberal character of the daguerreotype business in the American South. American daguerreotypists had to establish their own reputations and credentials through which to promote their photographic product in a market supporting the production of excess materials, and with readily available instruction. The format of the studio-gallery which typified the American marketplace would be a business model Newland continually emulated – and developed – at different locations across the southern hemisphere over the next decade. The Mexican–American War, and then the discovery of gold in California in 1848, intensified human traffic through port cities along the Mississippi, in the Mexican Gulf and throughout the Caribbean.
