In Focus: Carleton Watkins, Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California, The J. Paul Getty Museum: Los Angeles, California, 1997, 144 pp.
[p. 58] Plate 26
Consolidated Virginia Pan Mill, Virginia City, Nevada
Circa 1875, Albumen stereograph, 8.1 x 7.9 cm 96.XC.25.6
Watkins’s documentation of the Comstock mining region of Nevada during the mid-1870s was both extensive and effective. Once again he was far ahead of his time in choosing camera angles that emphasized the more heroic aspects of industrialization. This photograph is a study in contrasting patterns and textures: horizontal rows of windows and vertical smokestacks, softly sculpted earth and hard-edged roof lines, black walls and white window frames.
It was while Watkins was on one of these Nevada trips that his financial partner, John Jay Cook, moved to foreclose on the Yosemite Art Gallery. Watkins was not a good businessman and habitually failed to concentrate on a steady source of income to tide him over between major commissions. The end result was the loss of most of his early landscape negatives to competitor Isaiah West Taber, who began publishing them as his own.
. . .
[KR—These were the same type of buildings used by the Comstock Mines in Virginia City although they were probably not Senator Jones’s Mills.]