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

Art in America, April, 2000 by Bill Berkson

Whether working on commission or for the open market, Watkins was a thoroughgoing professional; his professionalism was a large part of his genius. His practice was unusual. He liked to display his pictures in custom-bound presentation albums and to stack them in black walnut frames salon-style on the walls of his Yosemite Art Gallery and at expositions. He also tended to hold out for prices higher than the popular market could bear. The record shows nothing of what he may have thought of the goings-on in land speculation or the social or environmental conditions in the cities and mining camps, which the pictures so often record. Any "investigative" aspect to his procedures would have to be an anachronism--it's unlikely that anything untoward captured by Watkins's lens got there other than inadvertently. In any event, taken cumulatively, his work comprises a kind of book of hours showing the conditions of life along the outer reaches of the continent (and on occasion, as far back east as Montana) in the last half of the 19th century. The photographs show his capacity for all that he could take in, hold and, in turn, assert so as to make it presentable to viewers variously informed (or eager to be) or resolutely skeptical. Inadvertently or not, Watkins grasped his own, and the nation's, need for a conscionable rhetoric.

In 1858, appearing in one of the land-dispute cases for which he furnished testimony in the form of photographs he had made, along with his spoken assurance as to their accuracy, Watkins described himself as "a photographist." The need for larger images to function in courtroom settings may have led to his eventually ordering from a cabinetmaker a camera that would hold negatives as large as 18 by 22 inches, but it was immediately following delivery of the camera, duly fitted with a Grubb Aplantic Landscape lens, that Watkins set out to take his first Yosemite pictures.

Nickel's selection is restricted to outdoor views; hence no portraits, set pieces or still lifes and only one or two architectural studies. (Naef's choices at the Getty are also mainly landscapes, with more pictures of buildings and two portraits, one of Jesse Fremont and the other of an unnamed Chinese actor.) Fair enough. Outdoor photography was what Watkins prided himself on. In 1878, geared up for the penultimate surge of his image-making career, he advertised himself as "the leading landscape photographer ... from Alaska to Mexico."[6] Few of the landscapes have any people in them, and when they appear, they serve mostly as scale markers for gigantic natural facts, like the men posed at the foot of the "Grizzly Giant" sequoia in the Mariposa Grove. Whatever Watkins's motives, it's hard not to feel, when confronted with examples of his Yosemite or Columbia River pictures, that the person who took them was unusually responsive to the sights that such places afforded. The amazement, glee, even exaltation he found in the face of what he set out to photograph can be imagined if not really demonstrated. Nevertheless, the strength of his literally "gritty" realism derives partly from how a sense of bodily self--assurance of being "on the spot," as Whitney put it[7]--inflected the operations of his machines. Physically, Watkins was a strong, stocky type about 5 feet, 7 inches, but with broad shoulders and large hands. Well into his 50s, he could muster the stamina for long, hard treks with mules and accoutrements on new campaigns up and around places like Glacier Point, Mount Shasta and Round Top, and then for the arduous tasks of preparing, exposing and storing his huge glass-plate negatives under difficult conditions.