Mineralogically, the Bolivian Andes are a trove. Difficult to get at, but rich. Silver, tin, copper, gold, molybdenum, bismuth, wolfram, and antimony vein mountains like Cerro Rico and Chorolque and ranges like Quimsa Cruz and San Vicente. Before the Spanish arrived five centuries ago, the mining was decidedly vernacular and domestic. Afterwards, industrial and international. During the 1800s, silver was king; tin deposed it in the early 1900s.
 
By 1910, the government had registered more than 250 commercial mines of every variety. Large companies like Aramayo, Patiño, and Hochschild, with familial and corporate roots that stretched from Bolivia to Europe, controlled much of the industry. They brought in managers and engineers and accountants from all over the globe. The largest city in central Bolivia’s mining region, Oruro, numbered 5,000 foreigners among its 22,000 inhabitants in 1902. Oruro was the last known mailing address of the Sundance Kid, who was presumably killed along with his outlaw companion Butch Cassidy in 1908 following the holdup of an Aramayo payroll.
 
Mine workers were not the only immigrants. Within a few years of Father Louis Compte’s demonstration of daguerreotypy in Rio de Janeiro in 1840, intrepid daguerreotypists had strapped the tools of their trade to mules and made the arduous trek up from the Pacific Coast to the Bolivian Altiplano. By the 1860s, photography was flourishing in the country.
 
Not surprisingly, the mining business drew the attention of photographers. Some, like the Bolivian Moisés Valdéz in Potosí, were professionals. During the 1880s and 1890s he documented the operations and personnel of the Aramayo, Francke & Co. The German Georges B. von Grumbkow, a civil engineer and photographer active in the 1870s, recorded whatever drew his interest. Others were small town entrepreneurs, like Chocaya’s Ciprian R. Vidal.
 
Many of the images that survive today, especially from the early 1900s, were made by anonymous workers, amateur shutterbugs who mailed home their snapshots for insertion in family albums. Others came from Bolivia’s remarkably fecund postcard publishers. The Hochschild-owned Huanchaca mine produced dozens of cards illustrating – and presumably promoting – its enterprise. Guillermo Manning, the son of an American Civil War veteran, settled in Tupiza, where he dabbled in mining, ran a newspaper, and sold chromolithic cards with regional views.
 
Daniel Buck (March 2007)