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

Art in America, April, 2000 by Bill Berkson

In those settings, part of the job was to discriminate graphically one spatial element or distance from another, a ledge in the foreground from the ridge facing it across a half-mile divide. In this regard, Watkins was a perfectionist. It's been remarked that the details in a stereograph flatten and poke out at you like flaps in a child's pop-up book, while the split between one shred of vision and the next is abrupt and freakish. Watkins enlarged upon this binocular disparity by tweaking the lenses further apart than was normal to arrive at even more drastic perspectival jumps. The result is a space littered with sudden, glassy voids or otherwise unintelligible transitions between jaggedly contiguous stuff. But in the big prints, it's the stuff itself, mass rather than spatial relations--the sheer spread of rocks, water, wood under blank egg-white skies--that Watkins best communicates. Still photographs of very still things, the mammoth views, taken one by one, show not an instant but an accretion.

Obviously, Watkins would use whatever came to hand to make his images both legitimate and legible. For his "stills," he used exposures through a lens uncapped for periods ranging from 15 seconds to half an hour. For images of falling water, as in what became the graphic efflorescences of Yosemite and Multnomah Falls, there's the shock of salient photographic time: a cleanly delineated, brilliant blur. With objects, the simplest, starkest symmetry would do. In any photograph, a solitary tree cast as a central character will tend to look ill at ease; Watkins's specimen trees--the buckeye draped absurdly over a shack, for example, or the explosive Arbutus Menziesii Pursh stranded in a plowed field--are no exceptions. For prospects of town or field, one device was the smallish, highly reflective, often geometrical detail--a white house--placed in the center to snap the scene into focus, much like the tiny dabs of crimson Monet and Renoir placed in their otherwise decentered Impressionist scenes. In his late work, Watkins ratcheted up his bare-bones plainness to an acme of almost unbearable clarity. Beyond the clean forms are any number of fabulous messes, visions of places so desolate or chaotic that there could be no angle from which to set them right. To contemporary eyes, the near-perfect waste of Mt. Lola; Looking NW Showing Effect of Wind on Trees (1879), as well as many of his studies of hydraulic mining, is just as ennobling as the more classically plotted views.

As a describer of surfaces, Watkins found his touchstone in the 30-foot-high, unplucked, weathered remnant called variously--in the midst of the naming frenzy to which Yosemite in the 1860s was subjected--"Ten-Pin Rock," "the Magic Tower" or "Agassiz Column." (Ironically, when Josiah Whitney named the rock after Louis Agassiz, who in his youth had proposed a theory of "ice-age" formations over millennia, neither man could have known that in fact the outcropping had survived as part of the granite that rose above the line of maximal ice and thus wasn't worked on at all by glaciers.) For some 60 years, the Agassiz Column was a notable feature at the Union Point overlook. Still visible from the valley below, it is no longer on the park map because the trail that led past it from Glacier Point down into the valley was rerouted in 1928. A recent color snapshot by the poet Clark Coolidge finds it to be a speckled reddish-brown lump of no sure size; holding, as Coolidge writes, "a chock in its mitten," it's obscured in parts by branches of Douglas fir and chaparral, framed by them and matted against the far cliff.[8]