The Photographist - Carleton Watkins, photographs, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California

Art in America, April, 2000 by Bill Berkson

The gallery walls devoted to the sumptuous Carleton Watkins exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art during its inaugural run there last summer were painted a variety of solid, somewhat somber colors keyed to a thematic arrangement of Watkins's photographs. From a narrow, deep-grape entryway you passed into a fairly orderly maze of rooms successively decked with mustard yellow (for "San Francisco and Vicinity"), lichen green (for "Yosemite"), and so on, through blue and mauve, and (for the late works of "New Series") back to green. The pictures--original prints of different sizes, from small stereocards to the multiplate panoramas and so-called mammoth wide-angle views on which, beginning in the early 1860s, Watkins's fame first rested--were hung at intervals around the rooms in black-painted wood frames. A final gallery had 12 computer terminals equipped with specially designed goggles for viewing a programmed selection of 200 out of the thousands of stereographs Watkins made during his long career. Using new technology to get a high-resolution version of the effects of the old, museum-goers could "flip through" the assortment electronically and, with a double-image card brought into instant binocular focus, take in this once ubiquitous medium's impressive, realer-than-real (hence really weird) three-dimensional immersion experience at the click of a mouse.

In every room, running along the base of the walls, was dark brown wainscoting. The period look of the galleries matched up well with the surface hues of Watkins's photographs--sepia, lavender, light blues, purples, blacks, creams and grays, and the gold tonings, which were among his specialties. (The subtleties he coaxed from a liberal use of this expensive process of letting gold bond with the layer of silver particles on the albumen sheet to deepen the tones and register distance are among the greater glories of his work.) The slight mismatch of elegant wall colorings with dadoes that smacked more of Victorian schoolrooms than of parlors or exhibition halls was especially appropriate for Watkins's peculiar mixture of earnestness and stunning excess, as well as for the cultural history within which the show's curator, Douglas R. Nickel, meant to locate him. The overarching wonder of Watkins's great pictures--and there are enough of those to secure a place for him in the first rank of photographers ever--is based on their mundane, but no less insistently high-pressure, practicality.

To Lewis Mumford, the Civil War years, during which Watkins emerged as an artist, saw "the colors of American civilization abruptly changed. By the time the war was over, browns had spread everywhere: mediocre drabs, dingy chocolate browns, sooty browns that merged into black." Accordingly, Mumford identified the ensuing 30-year phase of the arts in this country as "the Brown Decades," the title of his 1931 book on the subject. The painters who made their own equivalents for this color scheme were Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins and Albert Pinkham Ryder. As Mumford noted, the spirit of the times was "spattered and muddied": The means of life were changing rapidly from the [1850s] onward; here was a necessity for inventive adaptation which turned men from the inner life to the outer one, and to such manifestations of the inner life as had a plastic or structural equivalent. For lack of an harmonious system of concepts and feelings, this necessary change did not lead to an intelligent adaptation of the environment; in the planning of cities and the layout of railroads, highroads, farms, in the exploitation of mineral resources and the utilization of the land, a good part of our soils and cities were mined; indeed, the new industrial towns were ruins from the beginning. But the necessity for invention was present, and if it was passed over by the vulgar profiteers ... and industry, it was nevertheless a challenge and a stimulus to the best minds.[1]

The point of Nickel's installation and, more so, of his catalogue essay, was to put Watkins's work and its way of manifesting his "engagement with the phenomenology of perception" firmly and instructively in the proper milieu. Inspired by such recent scholarly texts as Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Nickel argues that, rather than perpetually reaffirming Watkins's excellence as a protomodern anomaly ahead of his time, we must see how "both the photographer and his audience were products of, and responding to, new modes of visuality emerging in the nineteenth century, brought about in part through modern innovations in the realms of entertainment, communications and travel."[2] Among the optical devices and entertainments then in play, Nickel brings to the for a Eadweard Muybridge's motion studies, "railroad vision" (or how travel by Pullman car "warped the ... individual's perception of space"), painted panoramas and dioramas, the household stereoscope and other optical entertainments. All of these existed in tandem with, or because of, the improved camera. Watkins's own unique improvements in the medium, Nickel says, "defeat interpretations of the narrative or symbolic sort because they aspired to be something altogether different from traditional art: they aspired to be perceptual, to engage the sensibilities of their beholders in an exercise of ocular gratification and visual intelligence."