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

Art in America, April, 2000 by Bill Berkson

Watkins's perceptiveness amounted to what the French call le compass dans l'oeil, like perfect pitch in music. His artistic engagement with this faculty extended first to a fascination with viewfinding as such and a quick grasp of the terms of early photography, particularly its way of fastening on spreads of seemingly infinite, sharp detail. It's possible to see photography's success and the "ocular possession" that Crary says came with it (preeminently by way of the tantalizing stereopticon) as symbolic of the era's general acquisitiveness, but Nickel is careful not to lay complicity with the bad habits of capitalism too mightily at Watkins's door. When Watkins photographed Yosemite in 1861, it was already taken for a correlative to the economic upthrust of the American West--a primeval, catastrophic landscape hailed as lordly emblem for the commensurably catastrophic obligations of Manifest Destiny. Twelve years later, thanks largely to the circulation of Watkins's images, the place had roads and a major visitors center.

For most of his career as a professional photographer, Watkins was charged with making accurate images of parts of the physical world as prospective elements for an improved material life. Historians readily write of him out on some ledge, "prospecting" for views. He photographed cities and their crowds, mountains, rivers, deserts, ironworks, mines, lumber mills, oil fields, bridges, railroads, ferryboats, agriculture and horticulture, dams, hotels, dilapidated missions, shipwrecks, residences of the new rich, and workers in all these situations. In every instance, history adheres to his pictures. He was often invited to document burgeoning industrial sites. His places are full of felled trees.

We know Watkins was ambitious but not exactly how he wanted to be seen. Like Eugene Atget, whose photographic career began just as Watkins's was winding down, he left us, aside from the evidence of the work itself, next to no clues as to his intentions and none at all regarding his attitude toward his subject matter. Them are huge gaps in our knowledge of him, most of them due to the loss of almost all of his papers, along with the prints and negatives that remained in his shop, in the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906.

This was the capper on a long list of misfortunes. In 1866, a New York firm pirated his early Yosemite images; in 1875, after a relatively prosperous decade (during which he nevertheless went heavily into debt), he was caught in a wave of bank failures and lost his gallery and its contents to a creditor who turned Watkins's negatives over to an unscrupulous rival; by 1890, in his sixties, Watkins began to suffer from incipient blindness, arthritis and persistent vertigo; five years later, he was sheltered with his ever-discontented young wife, Frankie, and their two children in a boxcar; after the 1906 fire, he lived another 10 years, the last six of them in a mental hospital, where he died, bleakly, at the age of 87. Compromised by a seemingly unyielding naivete, felled by circumstance, Watkins joined the ranks of eminent California casualties: John Sutter, Watkins's early patron John C. Fremont, and at least two more of Watkins's immediate circle, Albert Bierstadt and Frederick Law Olmsted--even the wildest success stories were often tinged, if not terminated outright, with severe financial setbacks, other forms of hard luck and ultimate dementia. The general mood of the time, as Mumford writes in The Brawn Decades, "was sometimes less than tragic; but at bottom it was not happy."