Public Programs @ The Institute

Series: Silberberg Lecture

Photographing Sovereignty in the Transpacific Mineral Trade

Tuesday, April 14, 2026, 6:00pm

Monica Bravo, Princeton University

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Photographer Charles Leander Weed traveled widely across the Pacific Rim during the 1850s and ‘60s. He was a skilled operator (best known making the first photographs of Yosemite) working in an elegant San Francisco establishment until his employer urged him to open a photographic studio in another Pacific port city, Hong Kong. Weed took with him the practices he developed among California’s mining community there and onto subsequent voyages to the then sovereign nation of Hawai‘i and Japan. 

Weed’s story demonstrates the interconnectedness of the Silver Pacific, as migrants, trade interests, and even mineral-based coinage crisscrossed the region. Using minerals as a critical lens allows me to examine photographs, which can be understood as silver commodities, relative to their materiality, participation in trade networks, and relationship to currency across four Pacific Rim sites traversed by Weed. Yet his photographs of community members and ports (including Hawaiian royalty and Yokohaman views) represent a complex negotiation of his artistic vision with his sitters’ and sponsors’ sometimes competing needs. His example allows us to see the play—and sometimes contest—of geopolitical forces at the level of individual will. Crucially, however, Weed’s travels across the northern Pacific Ocean were circumscribed by business opportunities, patrons, photographic markets, and even the sovereigns and regulations of distinct nations. This talk, then, analyzes a selection of his photographs to demonstrate the structures as well as the strictures of sovereignty within the mid- to late-nineteenth-century transpacific mineral economy. 

Monica Bravo is Assistant Professor of the History of Photography in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. She is the author of Greater American Camera: Making Modernism in Mexico, published by Yale University Press in June 2021. It was shortlisted for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association. Her next book, “Silver Pacific: A Mineral History of Early American Photography,” is under advance contract with Princeton University Press and has been supported by numerous fellowships. Publications related to this project have appeared in the journals American Art, Art Bulletin, Art History, and Photographica. Prior to Princeton, Bravo taught at Yale University, California College of the Arts, and the University of Southern California. She was the inaugural co-chair of Photography Network, a CAA Affiliated Society.