Carvalho was 38 years old and an unknown portrait artist and daguerreotypist when he received an offer from Col. John C. Fremont, the most famous adventurer of the day, to serve as the official photographer of Fremont’s Fifth Westward Expedition. For years, Fremont had been consumed with mapping a route for the transcontinental railroad. He had always included a sketch artist among his crew, but this time he wanted to use photography, a new technology, to document the terrain.

It was a risky proposition. Fremont’s previous foray had ended in disaster when ten men froze to death in the Rockies, and Carvalho was totally unprepared. An urbane city dweller raised in Charleston, S.C., he had never traveled West. In fact, he had never even saddled his own horse. No daguerreotypist had ever attempted anything like this before. Daguerreotopy, which was the earliest form of photography, had only been invented fourteen years earlier, in 1839. It was a cumbersome process involving polished silver-coated copper plates and lots of gear and chemicals, and it was prone to failure. Of the handful of professional daguerreotypists in the United States, nearly all worked indoors, shooting portraits. Capturing wide landscapes in extreme weather conditions was almost unheard of.

Solomon Nunes Carvalho in 1850. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

Yet two weeks after accepting Fremont’s offer, Carvalho set out, with a seasoned group of explorers, teamsters, hunters, and guides. It would be the journey of his lifetime. The team included white Americans, a German, a few Mexicans, ten Delaware Indians, and of course Carvalho, who was an observant Sephardic Jew of Spanish-Portuguese descent. From the very start, the group faced challenges: torrential rains, raging prairie fires, injuries, infighting. Col. Fremont became injured early on, and had to turn back to seek medical attention. After a six-week delay, Fremont rejoined his men in Western Kansas, and then led them, perhaps foolishly, toward the Rocky Mountains just as winter was about to set in.

Along the way, Carvalho dutifully worked at his craft and, against the odds, succeeded in capturing image after image of the landscapes, buffalo, and the expansive terrain of the West.

The expedition encountered the Cheyenne village at Big Timbers in late November, during a supply stop along the Santa Fe Trail. It wasn’t easy photographing the Native Americans, Carvalho found. “I had great difficulty in getting them to sit still, or even submit to having themselves daguerreotyped. I made a picture, first, of their lodges, which I showed them,” he later wrote.

Carvalho’s daguerreotype of Big Timbers shows a pair of teepees nestled up against the edge of a forest of tall pines. Atop a thicket of logs and tree branches, several skins or hides are set out to dry. Two human figures, faded to an almost ghostly pallor, anchor the image in time. Their faces are hard to make out, but one has long braids and both are dressed in traditional native outfits.

An engraving based on Carvalho’s daguerreotypes.

Princeton historian Martha A. Sandweiss, an expert in photography of the American West, credits Carvalho with creating a painstakingly deliberate scene. “Carvalho sensed he needed to preserve a certain amount of information,” she told me, in an interview. “He stepped back from the scene, and he has carefully framed the image. He’s not doing a close up, at least in this picture, of the two people, or of the teepee, or of a piece of meat on the ground. He’s trying to show us something about native life.”

Fremont was thrilled with Carvalho’s work. “We are producing a line of pictures of exquisite beauty, which will admirably illustrate the country,” he wrote to his wife, Jessie Benton Fremont. He described the pictures of Big Timbers as “jewels.”

Sandweiss believes the daguerreotype tells us as much about the photographer as it does the subject. “I think what we see in this picture is evidence of a collaboration. It’s important to remember that Carvalho was working with a camera on a tripod. This is not a snapshot. These Indian subjects knew they were being photographed, and they are looking Carvalho in the eye.”

Of the 300 or so daguerreotypes Carvalho made on the expedition, this image is the only survivor.

After the expedition, photographer Mathew Brady’s New York studio converted Carvalho’s daguerreotypes into hand-drawn printing plates, so they could be turned into etchings and published. At the time, converting photographs to etchings was the only way to reproduce them for large numbers of people to see. It seems inconceivable to us today, but at that early time in photographic history, the daguerreotypes themselves were considered worthless—just a means for carrying back visual information that would be enshrined forever on a steel printing plate. Years later, they ended up in a storage unit belonging to Fremont, and were destroyed in a fire in 1882—gone forever, and barely missed. The Big Timbers daguerreotype somehow, luckily, ended up in Brady’s personal collection, which now resides at the Library of Congress.

Rio Grande, painting by Solomon Nunes Carvalho. Courtesy of Oakland Museum of California.

The sixty-odd surviving etchings made from Carvalho’s daguerreotypes tell a spectacular story of discovery, but the one surviving image does more: It provides a spiritual connection to the past. For most of the years I worked on my documentary film, Carvalho’s Journey, I relied on various reproductions of the Big Timbers image. I finally had a chance to see the real thing during a visit to Washington, D.C. last year.

It is smaller than I had imagined, just four by five inches. In real life, the damage is worse than in reproductions. But holding it in my hands, I was struck by an intense proximity to history. This piece of copper was the same tool that miraculously captured the Cheyennes’ likenesses, their teepees, their hides drying on the line. It was the same bit of metal that an urbane, Southern-Jewish photographer carried thousands of miles on horseback and heated over a fire to develop. The moment captured on the plate, faded as it is, was the exact image Solomon Carvalho saw that day. Native people who had never seen a photograph before—and whose lives would never be the same after their collision with Europeans—would have seen it too. It was the vessel through which an unlikely visitor and a pair of Indians faced each other and forged a quintessentially American encounter.

Daguerreotypes, which are in many ways an art form lost to history, are reflective just like mirrors. On one as faded as Carvalho’s, the mirrored surface makes it almost impossible to see the image detail when you look directly at it. You instead see yourself, peering into it, looking into history.

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It was August 2014 and I was flying home from the Third International Marine Conservation Congress in Glasgow, Scotland, where I has just chaired a session on the impact of fake documentaries on public understanding of science. When my seatmate—a fifth-grade schoolteacher—found out that I’m a marine biologist, she decided to share this insight with me.

She was referring to “Mermaids: The Body Found” and “Mermaids: The New Evidence,” a series of Animal Planet specials that aired in 2012 and 2013. “Mermaids: The New Evidence” was, at the time of airing, the most successful show in Animal Planet’s history. The conceit: that mermaids were real and that scientists from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration were actively hiding their existence from the world. A few dedicated scientists, hunted and harassed by government agents (at one point, security footage literally shows men in black removing evidence from a lab), were fighting to expose the truth.

The shows were fake, though you could be forgiven if you didn’t realize that. Animal Planet, like many Discovery Communications properties, trades on its reputation for providing educational nature documentaries and lifestyle reality programs. The marketing for Mermaids leaned heavily on that reputation. Meanwhile, the disclaimer shown during the end credits flashed onscreen in tiny font for barely three seconds.

Mermaids was a success, and Discovery launched a series of compelling, yet fabricated, documentaries to capitalize on the ratings boom, including a pair of shows reporting on the continued existence of Megalodon (a giant and definitively extinct shark species), as well as shows about “Old Hitler” (a 60-year-old rogue hammerhead) and “Submarine” (a monster shark that sunk ferries and fishing vessels in South Africa). Discovery opened Shark Week 2013, its single most popular annual event, with “Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives.”

Unlike works of pure fiction, the stories were framed around real events and real people and institutions. Submarine blamed a real ferry accident, in which several passengers lost their lives, on a made-up shark; the search and rescue operators who performed admirably in their response to the accident had to issue a release disavowing Discovery Communications. Actual shark scientists were looped into the Shark Week narrative, often filmed without full knowledge of the theme and purpose of the documentary. And NOAA, of course, was directly accused of hiding evidence about the existence of mermaids. NOAA was so inundated with complaints that it had to issue its own press release declaring that mermaids were not real and that there was no evidence of their existence.

Partially or entirely fabricated nature documentaries aren’t a new development. Documentarians have thrived off manufactured moments since the birth of the format. “Nanook of the North,” a 1922 silent film that captures the daily life of an Inuk man in the Canadian Arctic, is often considered to be the first feature-length documentary. Later interviews revealed that significant parts of the film had been staged and bore little similarity to the lives of Inuit hunters at the time. Disney’s Academy Award-winning “White Wilderness,” a 1958 feature that explored wildlife in the high Arctic, famously featured a scene of lemmings so driven with migratory frenzy that they hurled themselves off of a cliff into the freezing sea. Despite later revelations that, far from documenting natural behavior, the scene was staged and filmmakers chased the animals off a cliff, “lemmings” continues to endure as a metaphor for blindly following a crowd to self-destructive ends. Even the classic and fondly remembered nature program “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom” has come under scrutiny for staging scenes that resulted in animal cruelty complaints.

Discovery Communications hasn’t been spared these accusations, either. In a four-part investigation, Christie Wilcox, a scientist and writer, documented how “Venom Hunters,” a Discovery Channel show about amateur snake-handling, contained animal abuse, permit violations, and misrepresentation. Other shows have also been exposed over the last few years for egregious animal welfare violations.

These kinds of programs muddy the waters of education-based television. In the case of documentaries like “White Wilderness,” they can actively and seemingly permanently distort our perception of the natural world or, as in “Nanook of the North,” disenfranchise modern communities by painting them as quaintly primitive. In the numerous cases of animal abuse, they cause active harm to the wildlife about which they are ostensibly attempting to educate the public.

And the bold and outright fabrications of shows like “Mermaids” erodes the public’s trust in government and scientific organizations. By framing the villain in these productions as real, often nonpartisan, institutions like NOAA, they don’t just direct resources away from the agency’s actual work by forcing it to respond to a phony controversy; they lend weight to other campaigns aimed at discrediting these organizations. In the United States, the active, well-funded movement to deny the scientific consensus on global climate is adept at capitalizing on manufactured controversy. By calling into question the motives and methods of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, an organization responsible for studying the effects of climate change on the United States’ coasts, Discovery provided validation for this anti-science movement and created an ecosystem ripe for exploitation by the merchants of doubt committed to undermining scientific consensus.

Unfortunately, major cable networks have vastly greater reach than all but the biggest research institutes. This makes it incredibly difficult for scientists to mount a proportional response when their discipline, research area, or even their own lab and research, are used for fodder in these fabricated documentaries. Though media empires like Discovery Communications have a reach that far exceeds the average citizen, social media and other web-based platforms have provided a venue through which knowledgeable parties can respond to this disinformation and boost the voices of subject experts who can respond directly to false of misleading claims. Following the first airing of “Mermaids: The Body Found,” my website, Southern Fried Science, began a concerted effort to respond to that particular flavor of fake documentary. David Shiffman and I published a guide to how scientists can respond and, more importantly, prepare, in the event that they find their research misrepresented through documentary and reality programs that are fabricated, either wholly or in part. There is no easy solution, and the success of many of these shows means that the fake documentary phenomenon is here to stay.

There is hope: After receiving significant criticism for its programming, Discovery’s head of programming announced in 2015 that the company would phase out these kinds of programming, at least for Shark Week. But lasting damage to the public’s trust in science has already been dealt.

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