Monica Bravo has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Specializing in the history of photography and the modern art of the Americas, Bravo will utilize the $60,000 grant to research and write her second book, Silver Pacific: A Material History of Photography and Its Minerals, 1840–1890. 

“With Silver Pacific, I intend to offer a new heuristic—a means for asking new questions, even of seemingly familiar objects—in American photographic history,” said Bravo. “Specifically, my research has been driven by a fundamental question: where did the raw materials for early photography come from?”

Exploring the origin of these raw materials elucidates and reframes the mid-19^th-century American West epoch, which represents some of the most canonical images in the history of photography. “I focus on a pre-industrial, regional ecology comprised of photography, its minerals, and its laborers before large manufacturers like Kodak and Ilford made it impossible to trace production from earth to plate or print.” Bravo’s new narrative shows early photography of the American West not as an inorganic technology but as a natural art form that visually captured while physically embodying its place of origin. “Such a classification scheme allows us to think of photographs as organically rooted in place and not solely or primarily as products of their makers,” said Bravo.

Fueled by a diverse immigrant labor force and with global impact, the project stands “at the confluence of American photographic, industrial, trade, and labor histories,” said Bravo. She traces the export of minerals mined in Northern California to the unexpected markets of Mexico, China, South America, and the U.S. Southwest. “Control of mineral resources and access to an abundance of migrant laborers thus set the stage for the Pacific Coast’s global photographic ascendancy,” she said.

Bravo’s title for her forthcoming book riffs on the term “Silver Atlantic,” coined to denominate transatlantic photographic exchange. Bravo argues that the discovery and industrialized mining of mercury, silver, and gold in California and Nevada drove the U.S. photographic ascendancy in the nineteenth century. “From a material standpoint—the Silver Atlantic of photography’s first decade quickly gave way to a Silver Pacific as mining practices shifted in the mid-nineteenth century,” she said.

Along with Bravo, Princeton’s Angela Creager, the Thomas M. Siebel Professor in the History of Science and professor of history, and Ryo Morimoto, assistant professor of anthropology, were among 260 recipients nationwide.