Carleton Watkins (Book Review)
Sunday, January 8th, 2012
Carleton Watkins (1829-1916) travelled from New York State to California as a young man alongside his slightly older family friend Collis Huntington. After some time in the West, Watkins took up a temporary position in a daguerreotypy studio and from that moment had found his calling… he would be a photographer.
Watkins had a mammoth camera made by a cabinetmaker to take 18 inch by 22 inch glass negatives and headed on the long and arduous trek to Yosemite where he produced mammoth plate photographs that were received with some acclaim. Although, the best of these Yosemite photographs were produced in the 1860s, while in his 30s as a more accomplished expert in the field. He went on to record much of the development of the West Coast including the gold rush and the ever-expanding railroads.
Watkins also produced a large number of stereoscopic photographic views through his career using a stereo camera, popular in the mid-to-late 1800s, and employed techniques like panorama and ‘putting a framed photograph on a wall’ that were quite novel.
So why have you probably not heard of Carleton Watkins? After all, he was the photographic rival to Edweard Muybridge. His friend Collis Huntington was to be one of the big four Robber Barons of the 19th Century railroads alongside Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker.
The answer is probably that Carleton Watkins left little evidence of his thinking behind in written words to share for posterity.
But he was also, in the end, a victim of fate. On the morning of 18 April, 1906 Carleton Watkins woke to the San Francisco earthquake and a studio where a lifetime work lay in broken glass plates and burning business records. He was approaching 70 and had just arranged for his life’s work to be bought by Stanford University. The post-earthquake fire deleted that work like a blunt force trauma. A half century of work. Gone.
