1875 Guatemala Photos by Eadweard Muybridge
Photographer Captures Coffee Bean Production, People and Places
Nov 5, 2008
In the cities of San Isidro, Antigua, Guatemala City, Santa Maria, San Jose, Champerico, and others, Muybridge captured images of town squares, government buildings, churches, monuments, volcanoes, Europeans in Las Nubes on the coffee plantation they owned or managed, and Native Guatemalans s at work and at rest. He also produced a panorama of Guatemala City using 11 of his photos.
When he visited, coffee bean production in Guatemala was a bustling enterprise, having overtaken natural dyes--indigo and cochineal--as the export leader. Production of Guatemalan coffee was driven by the demand of beverage drinkers in the United States and Europe. Muybridge's photos documented the bountiful need for land and labor in the production of coffee.
Handling of Coffee Beans
After preparing the soil and seeding it, workers kept the earth weeded so the young plants could thrive. And in particularly sunny areas like San Isidro, vegetation frames placed over the plants protected them from the heat. Three years after planting, the trees began producing berries, which Native Guatemalan women picked. Guatemalan men spread the berries on platforms to dry in the sun.
The husks of the berries were removed in the water-powered coffee mill. Each berry yielded two coffee beans, which native workers sorted by quality and sacked for shipment. Finally, the coffee beans were taken to the waterfront, where a boat took them to a waiting ship bound for their destination.
The Pacific Mail Steamship Company, an American-based company, which transported mail and passengers between California and Panama, sponsored Muybridge's trip to Central America and Mexico. Incidentally, the coffee plantation in Las Nubes was owned by William Nelson, the steamship company's representative in Guatemala. The company hoped the photos would encourage more business, so it subsidized the printing of the images in San Francisco. Muybridge offered 260 photos for sale to the public, some of Guatemala.
Stereoscopic Cards
Some of the images were stereoscopic cards. A stereoscopic card presented two side-by-side photos taken at the same time by a camera with a stereoscopic lens. The images were slightly different views of the same subject. When the card was placed in a stereoscope and held up to the viewer's eyes, the single image seen had the hard-edged, eye-popping look of a sculpture. Invented in the early 1850s, the stereoscope was in most homes of wealthy Americans by the 1860s.
Besides stereoscopic cards, Muybridge offered 120 prints of Mexico and Central America for sale as a set. He also put some photos together in five albums under the collective title, the Pacific Coast of Central America and Mexico; the Isthmus of Panama; Guatemala; and the Cultivation and Shipment of Coffee. This collection was issued in limited numbers and given to his patrons and those who had helped him win acquittal for slaying his wife's lover.
Muybridge's photos are a valuable socioeconomic record of the Native Guatemalans and how the business of coffee affected their lives and those of the Europeans who lived there.
Sources:
Burns, E. Bradford. Eadweard Muybridge in Guatemala, 1875: The Photographer as Social Recorder. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Haas, Robert Bartlett. Muybridge: Man in Motion. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.
Harris, David, ed. Eadweard Muybridge and the Photographic Panorama of San Francisco, 1850-1880. Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture. 1993.
