Online NewsHour: The West in Pictures -- September 14, 1999



	A THOUSAND WORDS

	September 14, 1999
	Essayist Richard Rodriguez of the Pacific News Service considers a photographer who helped create our vision of the American West.

RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: No one would be more surprised than Carleton Watkins himself to find his photographs hanging here in San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art, a few blocks away from where his studio was located 100 years ago.

Today, Watkins is considered by many in the art world to have been the finest American landscape photographer of the 19th century. His photographs, like this elegant view of the Columbia River, or this photograph of California cling peaches, are compared to modernist paintings of Degas and Cézanne in their composition and sense of perspective.

Carleton Watkins was born on the other side of America in Upstate New York. He was a boy of ten when photography was invented in Europe. By the time he went West in the 1850's, the common assumption was that the camera was a scientific tool, a technology for pragmatists, not artists or mystics. Watkins took these photographs of logging camps and mining camps and train tracks, because his clients were businessmen, busy building the West.

There is no sense of paradise lost in these scenes of young Salt Lake City or San Francisco or Portland. Notice the way Portland, Oregon, emerges from the shattered remnants of the forest in the foreground. But if there is an optimistic sense of man's rightful place in this Eden, there is also astonishment at this land that we dare to inhabit. The West upsets our conventional ways of seeing and thinking. Trees reduce humans to insects; there are desert Indian dwellings that unravel time. In such a place, surrealism governs. A tree is photographed taller than a mountain; a lake turns the known world upside down.

After Abraham Lincoln saw Watkins' photographs of Yosemite, he signed a bill to protect the region from development. It was at Yosemite, that nature reinvented photography. Faced by the enormity of what was before him, Watkins felt forced to rebuild his camera to produce 18 x 21-inch negatives. A century later, and in the same way, this Hollywood would need to photograph this landscape in cinemascope and vista vision.

These photographs of Yosemite were taken in the 1860's, at a time when America was splitting in half, North versus South. But along the East-West axis, the railroad was binding America together. Our expansionist ambition was realized, as Atlantic was joined to the Pacific. So there was this irony. At the same time that the nation's soul was tearing in half, the American imagination was expanding West toward the infinite. On the new railroads, Americans saw the nation from a new height, and at a new speed, not frontally, but from a train window, one corner of the horizon sliding away as the other corner of the view came rushing, rushing forward.

Watkins belonged to this new East-West America. He produced panoramas, these images meant to be placed on a wall side by side, because the human eye could no longer see America at a glance, so vast was the scene, whether cityscape or wilderness. He also produced images for the stereoscope, an invention that became common in many American parlors. Two almost identical photographs, placed side by side and mounted together produced a three-dimensional depth when viewed through a binocular holder. What separates us today from those 19th century Americans who sat in their houses all over this country and marveled at these views through their stereoscopes is that our modern eyes had been dulled.We no longer see through smog the West that the 19th century saw.

Carleton Watkins died nearly penniless in 1916. But to see through his lens is to sense again the importance of the western landscape for the nation's imagination. At a time of North-South division, the landscape of the West redefined us, restoring our optimism and wonder. Watkins himself was transformed by this mysterious place, from the technician photographer into an artist. I'm Richard Rodriguez.

MARGARET WARNER: The Carleton Watkins exhibit has left San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art; it will reopen at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in early October.

Program
Support
From: