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

Art in America, April, 2000 by Bill Berkson

His immediate audience was a select one, many members of which shared what Mumford calls "a new sense of the land [that] was scientific and realistic ... chiefly the work of a handful of naturalists, geographers, and landscape planners." Literati like Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes admired and wrote about his work. In Jesse Benton Fremont's San Francisco salon, presided over by the Unitarian minister Thomas Starr King, he met accomplished landscape painters like Thomas Hill, Virgil Williams and William Keith. Bierstadt saw Watkins's Yosemite views in the early 1860s and later bought a set of them for the princely sum of $600; in his second painting trip to the valley in 1872, however, Bierstadt was accompanied by Watkins's arch-competitor in plein-air photography, Muybridge. Watkins's scientist friends and supporters included the exploratory geologists William H. Brewer, Josiah Dwight Whitney and Clarence King and the botanist Asa Gray. When Gray's Harvard colleague Louis Agassiz visited San Francisco in 1870, Watkins photographed the great naturalist standing as if in midsentence before a board strewn with drawings of primordial animal shapes. A couple of years earlier, Whitney had given Agassiz's name to the strangely jointed and contoured rock that became one of Watkins's favorite subjects in his "New Series" Yosemite work.

Another, even more intriguing, connection is the one between Watkins and the landscape architect Olmsted. Like Watkins, Olmsted, who early on styled himself a footloose gentleman farmer, wandered unprepared into his art. One of the heroes of Mumford's historical narrative, he was first lured to California in 1863 by the trustees of the Mariposa Estate, the gold-mining operation that bordered on Yosemite Valley to the north. The Mariposa had belonged to the Fremonts, but John Fremont had sold his and Jesse's majority interest in it after losing much of his fortune in a series of unsuccessful political campaigns.

Olmsted became superintendent-manager of the Mariposa in late '63. The next year, partly due to Watkins's documentation, the U.S. Congress declared as "inviolate" both Yosemite and the adjacent Mariposa Big Tree Grove, and California's governor, Frederick Low, appointed Olmsted chairman of the first board of commissioners. Olmsted in turn assigned Clarence King to survey the boundaries of the preserve and asked Watkins and Thomas Hill for suggestions as to how best to treat it. Olmsted, whose connections with his original Central Park project were severed during the war, envisioned Yosemite unsentimentally as a kind of open-air natural science museum, which was pretty much how Watkins, tutored by the naturalists, pictured it. (When Fitz-Hugh Ludlow, Bierstadt's companion on his first Yosemite visit, wrote a bombastic description of the place, Olmsted promptly called Ludlow's account "an abomination."[5])

Unlike the painters, photographers had no recourse to dramatic lighting or atmosphere to tie together the details of their sublime landscape conceptions. Muybridge, who, like the painters, tricked out his Yosemite scenes with anecdotes and atmospheric flimflam, was dashing and complex, and some of his pictures now look like overacting. Watkins, whose pictures continue to look fresh, was purposeful, no less agile, and a splendid simplifier. Like today's imp of the spectacular, Bill Viola, whose retrospective coincided with the Watkins show at SFMOMA, Muybridge was a master of legerdemain and garrulous middlebrow metaphysics. By contrast, Watkins's accounts have a tight-lipped, "look-here" positivism.