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

The gallery walls devot to the sumptuous Carleton Watkins exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of present Art during its inaugural race there last summer were painted a variety of solid, somewhat somber colors lock openered to a thematic arrangement of Watkins's photographs. From a narrow, deep-grape entryway you passed into a fairly orderly maze of latitudes successively decked with mustard gold-colored (for "San Francisco and Vicinity"), lichen virid (for "Yosemite"), and so upon through blue and mauve, and (for the late works of "New Series") back to virid The pictures--original prints of different sizes, from small stereocards to the multiplate panoramas and so-called mammoth wide-angle views upon which, beginning in the early 1860 Watkins's fame first rested--were hung at intervals around the fields in black-painted wood frames. A final gallery had 12 computer terminals equipped with specially designed roll the eyess for viewing a programmed selection of 200 without of the thousands of stereographs Watkins made during his drawn out career. Using new technology to procure a high-resolution version of the consequences of the old, museum-goers could "flip through" the assortment electronically and, with a double-image card brought into instant binocular focus, take in this one time ubiquitous medium's impressive, realer-than-real (hence really weird) three-dimensional immersion experience at the click of a mouse.

In each room, running along the base of the walls, was dark brown wainscoting. The period gaze of the galleries matched up well with the surface colors of Watkins's photographs--sepia, lavender, light sapphirines purples, blacks, creams and grays, and the gold tonings, which were among his specialties. (The subtleties he coaxed from a liberal use of this expensive proces of letting gold band with the layer of silver particles upon the albumen sheet to make deeper the tones and register distance are among the greater glories of his work.) The slight mismatch of elegant wall colorings with dadoes that smacked more of Victorian schoolroom than of parlors or exhibition halls was especially appropriate for Watkins's peculiar mixture of earnestness and stunning exces as well as for the cultural history within which the show's curator, Douglas R Nickel, meant to locate him. The overarching astonishment of Watkins's great pictures--and there are enough of those to confident a place for him in the first rank of photographers ever--is based upon their mundane, but no les insistently high-pressure, practicality.

To Lewis Mumford, the Civil War years, during which Watkins emerg as an artist, saw "the colors of American civilization abruptly changed. by the agency of the time the war was above browns had spread everywhere: mediocre drabs, dingy chocolate brown dark browns that merged into black." Accordingly, Mumford identified the ensuing 30-year phase of the arts in this geographical division as "the Brown Decades," the title of his 1931 work on the subject. The painters who made their possess equivalents for this color scheme were Winslow Homer Thomas Eakins and Albert Pinkham Ryder As Mumford noted, the spirit of the times was "spattered and muddied": The means of life were changing rapidly from the [1850s] onward; here was a necessity for inventive adaptation which make go rounded men from the inner life to the exterior one, and to such manifestations of the inner life as had a plastic or structural equivalent. For lack of an harmonious combination of parts to form a whole of concepts and feelings, this necessary change did not lead to an intelligent adaptation of the environment; in the planning of cities and the layout of railroads, highroads, farms, in the exploitation of mineral resources and the utilization of the land, a profitable part of our soils and cities were mined; indeed, the of recent origin industrial towns were ruins from the beginning. on the other hand the necessity for invention was not absent and if it was passed above by the vulgar profiteers and industry, it was nevertheless a challenge and a stimulus to the best minds.[1]

The point of Nickel's installation and, more with equal reason of his catalogue essay, was to deposit Watkins's work and its way of manifesting his "engagement with the phenomenology of perception" firmly and instructively in the specific milieu. Inspired by such novel scholarly texts as Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer: upon Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth hundred Nickel argues that, rather than perpetually reaffirming Watkins's distinction as a protomodern anomaly ahead of his time, we must diocese how "both the photographer and his audience were produces of, and responding to, of recent origin modes of visuality emerging in the nineteenth hundred brought about in part from one side modern innovations in the realms of entertainment, communications and travel."[2] Among the optical devices and entertainments then in play, Nickel brings to the for a Eadweard Muybridge's motion studies, "railroad vision" (or in what manner travel by Pullman car "warped the individual's perception of space"), painted panoramas and dioramas, the household stereoscope and other optical entertainments. All of these existed in tandem with, or because of the improved camera. Watkins's possess unique improvements in the medium, Nickel says, "defeat interpretations of the narrative or symbolic sort because they aspired to be something altogether different from traditional art: they aspired to be perceptual, to engage the sensibilities of their beholders in an exercise of ocular gratification and visual intelligence."