Haines is pleased to announce the acquisition of Binh Danh's Malakoff Diggins State Historic Park, 2024, by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Danh reconfigures traditional photographic techniques and processes in unconventional ways to delve into the connection between history, identity, and place. For over a decade, the artist has traveled across the American West, making daguerreotypes of US National Parks on silver plates in a mobile darkroom he calls Louis, after Louis Daguerre.
Danh extends the pursuit of pioneering photographers such as Ansel Adams and Carleton Watkins, whose iconic images the artist had seen long before stepping foot in these parks, while imbuing this scenery with his distinctly personal perspective — namely, an attempt to negotiate his connection as a Vietnamese American with the landscape and history of the United States. The highly reflective surfaces of his contemporary daguerreotypes literally mirror their surroundings, enabling people of all backgrounds to see themselves as a part of the American landscape.
Established as a California state historic park in 1965, Malakoff Diggins was once the largest hydraulic mining site in California, where high pressure hydraulic jets were used to erode the mountainside and extract gold deposits. Legal battles between the North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Company and nearby agricultural towns resulted in the first environmental protection legislation in the United States in 1884, though mining operations at Malakoff Diggins would continue for another two decades. Danh’s work joins an image of the same site by Carleton Watkins taken in 1871, also in the collection of the National Gallery.
