Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
October 5, 1999 - January 9, 2000
The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents an exhibition of 98 images by CARLETON WATKINS (1829-1916), America's greatest landscape photographer. Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception is the first large-scale examination of an often under-recognized artist. The exhibition includes more than 85 mammoth prints, including work from his famous series of the pristine and then virtually unknown Yosemite Valley, as well as many other lyrical views of the American West.
At the height of his career, Carleton Watkins was a leader in his field. His photographs helped convince Abraham Lincoln to sign the Yosemite Bill in 1864 — a tacit recognition of the necessity of natural conservancy in a climate of rampant development, and an important precedent in establishing the present system of national parks. The photographs were exhibited at the 1867 Paris International Exposition, where they were awarded a first-prize medal, and were later seen by Napoleon III. More than a century later, his images still create a visceral impact, effectively pulling the viewer into the scene by means of artistic devices such as radical framing, deep-space perspective, and intruding foreground objects — the same devices used contemporaneously by modernist painters such as Edgar Degas and Paul Cézanne.
The photographs in the exhibition are drawn from museum, corporate, and private collections throughout North America. In addition to Carleton Watkins's large-format prints, the exhibition includes several immense panoramic pictures — works made of large prints placed side-by-side to orchestrate a vast sweep of visual terrain — and many stereo views. Stereographs — two small photographs mounted together that, when placed in a special binocular view, give the illusion of three-dimensional depth — are displayed in the exhibition not only in original Victorian-era stereoscopes, but also and more extensively in a novel interactive computer presentation.
Born and raised in Oneonta, New York, Carleton Watkins settled in San Francisco at the height of the Gold Rush, taking up the still-new medium of photography in the mid-1850s. On the East Coast, reports of the massive California landscape had taken on mythic proportions, and accounts of colossal mountains, giant trees, expansive deserts, and a vast ocean were considered improbable by many. Watkins himself was struck by the immensity of the Western landscape, and aspired to capture the vastness and grandeur of its space and scale. As confirmation of stories emerging from the West — and to help render comprehensible the size and proportions of the trees, rock formations, mountains, and waterfalls in his photographs — statistical measurements of these natural wonders often accompanied his images or were included in their titles.
In the early 1860s, Colonel John Frémont, the explorer who mapped the American West with his friend Kit Carson, enlisted Carleton Watkins to photograph his land and mines. It was this association with Frémont that first led Watkins to photograph Yosemite, resulting in some of his most famous work. Recognizing that the scale of the valley required exceptional preparations, Watkins had a cabinetmaker fashion a huge camera capable of holding negatives 18 by 22 inches in size. The resulting pictures were lush in detail, visually coherent, and psychologically compelling. By December 1862 the views were the talk of New York. There, and in San Francisco, they were displayed in galleries and collected by scientists, investors, mining engineers, homesteaders, and tourists.
"Watkins managed to capture the physical magnitude and visual textures of Yosemite with a grace and intelligence unsurpassed today," said Maria Morris Hambourg, who curated the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum and is Curator in Charge of its Department of Photographs.
In 1867 the photographer traveled to Portland, Oregon, and up the Columbia River, making several images that have since become icons of Western landscape photography. Views such as Cape Horn near Celilo (1867) express the faith of Carleton Watkins's generation of Americans in the continuing westward advance of civilization. More than just an illustration of Manifest Destiny of the local railroad's route, it achieves an artful balance between the valley etched by the river and the railroad laid down alongside it, recognizing the providential harmony of nature and man in this particular place.
Through his childhood friend Collis Huntington, he became the unofficial photographer for the Central Pacific and Southern Pacific Railroads in the 1870s and 1880s and was allowed to travel free along their lines. As the rampant laying of railroad tracks penetrated the continent, Carleton Watkins aligned his photography with the changing perceptions the train brought to the landscape.
With increased competition and the economic crash of the mid 1870s, Carleton Watkins's financial fortunes turned. In the wake of his bankruptcy he spent long periods on assignment out of San Francisco, traveling to Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. Agricultural assignments in Sonoma, the San Gabriel Valley, and Kern County resulted in such memorable images as Arbutus Menziesii Pursh (1872-78) and Late George Cling Peaches (ca. 1887-88), both of which document the thriving new industry made possible by irrigation farming in areas serviced by new rail lines.
He continued to expand the range of his activity in the 1880s, and his abstract vision found new, unconventional subjects for a broadening audience. One of his last commercial projects involved documenting the new dams and waterways of the Golden Gate and Golden Feather mines in Butte County, California, in 1891. For these final images he returned to his trademark mammoth camera and wet-plate negatives. One of the views stands out as a remarkable symbol of the intrepid Carleton Watkins: at the foreground of Gold Feather Mining Claim, No. 9 (1891), silhouetted by the bright sun, is the shadow of the photographer himself in a rare self-portrait with his giant camera.
Stereo Views: The 19th Century Meets the 21st
With the exception of photography itself, the most important and popular visual technology of the 19th century was the stereograph. Watkins made more images in stereo than in any other format, inventing pictures with spectacular three-dimensional effects. In the 1850s, stereo views were a widespread, inexpensive, mass-marketed form of entertainment, and a stereo viewer and basket of cards was to be found in every proper Victorian parlor. A selection of original stereo cards are displayed in the exhibition.
The Howard Gilman Gallery, the final room of the exhibition, also contains 12 computer viewing stations that utilize cutting-edge technologies — designed especially for this exhibition — to simulate the stereoscopic effect. The viewing stations provide access to approximately 200 stereo cards by Watkins, organized by year, subject matter, and region. Using special eyeglasses with liquid crystal lenses that synchronize with the computer via a transmitter, visitors see the selected images in three dimensions. The software interface for this unusual presentation was designed by the multimedia firm Perimetre Design using stereo-imaging technology developed by StereoGraphics, creators of the stereo-viewing system for the Mars Pathfinder, essentially employing 21st-century innovations to bring 19th-century images back to the broad public for whom they were originally created. Silicon Graphics 320 Visual Workstations and StereoGraphics CrystalEyes Eyeware were contributed for this exhibition.
Publication: Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception is accompanied by a catalogue featuring over 100 tritone plates — including four gatefolds illustrating Watkins's rarely reproduced panoramas — and 20 duotone illustrations. An introduction by Maria Morris Hambourg, a scholarly essay by Douglas R. Nickel, Associate Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and biographical material by Peter E. Palmquist, an independent scholar and Watkins biographer, are included. The catalogue is available in softcover ($35) in the Metropolitan Museum's book shop. A hardcover edition ($60), copublished with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., is also available at US booksellers.
Exhibition itinerary: The exhibition originated at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and subsequent to its New York viewing will be shown at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., from February 6 through April 30, 2000.
Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in association with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and with special cooperation from the Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California.
Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception was curated by Douglas R. Nickel and Maria Morris Hambourg.
THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
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