Carleton E. Watkins
Carleton E. Watkins
1829 - 1916
American photographer. He migrated to San Francisco in the early 1850s in the wake of the gold rush. In 1854 Watkins met the daguerreotypist Robert Vance (1825–76), who hired him as a camera operator. Watkins opened his own studio in 1858 and began travelling to photograph the American West. Using a mammoth-plate camera he photographed in Yosemite Valley from 1861 (e.g. Panoramic View of the Yosemite Valley, c. 1865; Washington, DC, Lib. Congr.). In spring 1867 Watkins opened his first public gallery and sent 30 of his mammoth prints to the Exposition Universelle in Paris, where he was awarded a medal.
These transcendental views were praised in the early photographic journals by many writers, including Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–94), and influenced the US Congress to make the Valley a national park. By making purposefully artistic images, Watkins became one of the best-known landscape photographers, with an international reputation. Using artistic devices also engaged by artists such as such as Edgar Degas and Paul Cézanne—radical framing, deep-space perspective and intruding foreground objects—Watkins created imagery with a new, more expansive and visceral impact. Watkins used a specially constructed camera yielding negatives that measured 18×20 inches (457×508 mm); his framed prints had the physical presence of paintings in an era when most photographs were small and confined to albums. The Columbia River series, which consists of 60 large negatives and 136 stereographs taken in 1867 along the route upriver to Cape Horn, represents a high point in Watkins’s career.
For three decades Watkins was a very successful commercial photographer, working for government-sponsored geological surveys and for industrial clients including, Las Mariposas Mines and the Central and Southern Pacific Railroads. Watkins used the commissions to travel and to produce views of landscapes in Oregon (1868; e.g. Devil’s Canyon, Geysers, Looking Down), Utah (1873), Nevada (1876), Southern California (e.g. The Town on the Hill, New Almaden) and Arizona (1880), the Pacific Northwest (1882–3) and Idaho and Montana (1884–5). All of these trips yielded series of photographs sold through Watkins’s San Francisco studio. He sent the best examples to exhibitions across the USA and Europe, winning prizes and maintaining a strong reputation until his eyesight began to fail in 1892. In 1906 all his negatives were lost in the San Francisco earthquake fire. [Sheryl Conkelton. "Watkins, Carleton E." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 15, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T090822.]
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