This depiction of San Francisco is one of the earliest paper photographs made on the West Coast. Created just a few years after gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill, it captures the city’s newfound prosperity, from the construction of Old Saint Mary’s Cathedral in the foreground to the ship masts of the busy harbor in the background.

Fardon moved to San Francisco as one of over 300,000 newcomers that flocked to the city between 1848 and 1855. He established a photography studio that created portraits of upper-class residents and urban scenes like this one, which was included in a monumental seven-panel panorama he made of the northeast corner of the city. He also published the first album of city views in the U.S. Yet Fardon only stayed in San Francisco a short time, moving to the British Columbia colony in 1858 when gold was discovered there and the California veins had begun to run dry.

—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023).