1997 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.
[December, 2014: I began this entry several months ago if not from the beginning, and I seem to be bogged down in whether this ought to be part of the introduction, the ordinry temporarily of this daliesque bent piece of out of time or late landscape, that is located near the beinning the white man’s institution of violence, brutality and constituted self justifying rules, textual vigilantes . . . ]
Carleton Watkins [1829-1916]
Introduction:
Foreward:
Plate 26 c.1875
Plate 31 1880
Plate 33 1880
Introduction:
Carleton E. Watkins (1829-1916) stands today at the symbolic apex of all that is unreservedly grand about the American West of the mid-nineteenth century. An immigrant from a small village in upstate New York, Watkins embraced his new California home with a lover’s passion. He is perhaps best remembered for the technical and artistic excellence of his images of Yosemite—images characterized by the oft-repeated statement from the “best general view.” Competing photographers marveled at his ability to make these pictures in a wilderness setting with a tiny dark tent (see back jacket[ [of this catalog]) as the only amenity.
The J. Paul Getty Museum holds more than 1,400 photographs by Watkins, 187 of which were made from so-called mammoth plates, very large glass-plate negatives approximately eighteen by twenty-two inches in size. While Watkins is best known for these grand images, this volume focusses on his smaller works, including stereographs and prints in cabinet and boudoir formats. These pictures reveal a photographer whose scope of work went far beyond the dramatic, Edenic landscapes that first brought him fame.
Photography almost always changes the context of the subject being photographed. Transferring photographs to the pages of a book changes the context even further. For example, the picture reproduced on the front jacket of this book is of a monumental landscape. Watkins made a photograph of the scene that is approximately five inches in diameter. A photograph of this image was reduced to roughly [p. 6]
[Front cover: Carleton Watkins. “Agassiz” Column, Yosemite, 1878 (pl. 27). Albumen print, diamter: 12.5 cm. 92.XM.81.4.]
four inches in order to fit on the front jacket, yet the picture reads as a majestic composition regardless of it comparatively small size. The context is also detemined by the perspective of the photographer—the viewer sees what the photographer wants the viewer to see. Changes in the artist’s viewpoint, or even equipment, change the entire picture. An example of this is provided by two of Watkins’s works, a mammoth plate of the Columbia River (p. 119) and its corresponding stereograph (pl. 16). (Stereographs, which are meant to be viewed as a pair in a stereoscope, are reproduced in this volume as a single image) In the context of this In Focus book, the selected pictures have been arrangd chronologically and formatted to fit the page size of the series. The result is a portable exhbition of photographs that relate to each other on purely aesthetic terms.
In spite of significant decontextualization, the views selected for this book convey a unity of perception and the well-ordered workmanship and attention to detail that have come to symbololize Watkins’s singular eye. As John Coplans, a long-time Watkins’ entusiast states: “Although a photographer cannot invent to the same degree as a painter, the detailing within a Watkins photograph . . . is so carefully ordered that it appears to be under the same kind of control.”
[p. 7] Watkins’s photographic career spanned more than fifty years, and his travels covered thousands of miles, from British Columbia in the north to the Mexican border on the south; westward to the Farallon Islandss of of San Francisco and eastward as far as Yellowstone. There were very few subjects that were outside the scope of his camera. He photographed lumber mills, and lavish mansions in California, railroads in Oregon, smelters in Nevada, and prehistoric ruins in Arizona. His work took him to the top of Mount Shasta in 1870, where he was plagued by glare ice, and to the bottom of a Montana copper mine in 1890, where he suffered horribly from dampness and vertigo. He often journeyed by train, with his horse-drawn “traveling wagon” (p. 6) carried on one flatcar and his living quarters on another. Not only did he created outstanding visual documents for his clients, he was also a major chronicler of the commercially developing West.
Watkins has, in the judgment of many, emergerd as the single most important American phtographer before Alfred Stieglitz. Weston Naef, commenting on this evolving appreciation, has maintained that Watkins “had the uncanny ability to choose the best point from which to view any particular subject and the power to structure his photographs as an interconnected web of relationships that are about the act of pure perception.” A master artist? Yes, but also an enigma and a contradiction for his biographers. It is known that Watkins immigrated west in 1851 to make a new life for himself and that he became a portrait photographer by accident when asked to fill in for an absent camera operator, a role he filled successfully from 1854 to 1856. One can only speculate, however, as to the steps that led to his commitment to outdoor photography. Throughout his working life, Watkins won international acclaim for the excellence of his photographs, yet he died in poverty and was interred in an unmarked grave. Although his photographs of the Pacific Coast were considered the finest of their kind, he lost many of his negatives to a competitor and had his life’s work destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. Well known in the 1860’s, Watkins’s pictures slipped from view until the 1960’s. It is even difficult to know with certainty what Watkins looked like, his image being captured more in shadows (p. 8) than in portraits.
In many ways, the ongoing investigation of Watkin’s life and work resembles an archeological dig. Under ideal circumstances, a biographer will have access to a photographer’s business records, photographic archives, and personal (p. 8) papers. Sadly, all were obliterated in the 1906 disaster. Consequently, most of what is known about Watkins today has come by way of accumulated bits and pieces of information, which, when cobbled together, can lead to conclusions of fact. The best source of information. which form a sort of visual diary of where and when he travelled. Because there is no comprehensive catalogue of his output, researchers are always on the lookout for new or potential examples. On such archaeological fragment, attributable to Watkins, may well be the earliest surviving outdoor photograph made by him (see p. 93).
In Watkins’s heyday a mammoth-print photograph sold for $43.50 and stereographs were $5.00 per dozen, when and if he could find a buyer. “More of an artist than a businessman,” it was said, yet he adamantly refused to lower his standards, even when competition from mass production caused the price of a dozen stereographs to fall to $1.50 and bankruptcy was inevitable. Thus, despite the tragic overtones of Watkins’s personal and financial life, his photographs stand today as a timeless tribute to one man’s persistent and indefatigable pursuit of his art.
—Peter E. Palmquist+X
(p. 9) Plates
Notes to the reader
Stereographs, which are meant to be viewed as a pair in a stereoscope, are reproduced in this volume as a single image. Plate 3 reproduces both halves of a stereograph.
Where possible, names of works have been assigned based upon Watkins’s own inscriptions, printed titles on stereographed cards, and captions in his albums.
. . .
1997 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.
. . .
[p. 68] Plate 31
Beach and Bathing House at Santa Monica 1880
Albumen print 11.1 x 17.8 cm 94.XM.30.2
On June 26, 1880, Watkins wrote a less-than-happy letter to his wife from Santa Monica, California. “I am down here by the illimitable and ever restless sea, and it does nothing but sigh and moan and blow, blow, blow . . . I did not put on my overcoat and nearly froze.” This photograph of the beach was taken from a pier extending out into the Pacific.
Watkins’s boudoir-style pictures were an adaptation of the more traditional 5-by-8-inch landscape panels commonly used by photographers during the 1880s and 1890s. However, instead of having the image occupy the entire print area, Watkins masked the view to include wide print margins, frequently with a domed top. Letterpress captions were imprinted on the mounts (tourists could purchase these views mounted or unmounted). Watkins’s most interesting innovation, however, was a specially designed stereoscopic camera that took a large glass plate measuring 5 1/2 x 14 inches. He could thus make the equivalent of two negatives (a stereo pair) at each exposure. From each end of the plate; he produced prints that were approximately 5 x 7 inches. By using the proper printing masks, he could create stereographic and/or individual cabinet and boudoir prints, all from the same original negative.
Plate 33. Oil
Plate 33.Star Oil Works, San Fernando District, S.P.R.R., 1880
Albumen stereograph
The discovery of oil in the San Fernando Valley dates from the 1850s, but large scale exploitation did not occur until the 1890s. While on his 1880 trip along the route of the Southern Pacific Railroad Watkins made some of the very earliest pictures of the fledgling petroleum industry in Southern California. Because of his work in the mining industry in Nevada, he was very experienced at photographing the machinery and trappings of industrial activity.
This partcular image of a California Star Oil Works Company well is oddly portraitlike inasmuch as the derrick stands aloof from a hillside backdrop patterned with scrub vegetation. This feeling is further reinforced through the use of a long-focus lens, which brings the tower closer to the viewer and compresses the space between foreground and background.