The Online Photographer

'The Book Will Surely Prevail'

My friend and former teacher Joe Cameron, in his post "H.C.-B. in Ink" last Friday, mentioned Ralph Gibson:

But I also remember hearing the photographer Ralph Gibson suggest once that the deep rich black of printer’s ink came closer to conveying his ideas than the silver of printing paper. He was glad to sell 'original prints' to collectors but he implied that the book pages holding his images were truer to his vision.

As I often try to do when people are mentioned or referenced in our posts—I am forever casting lines into the water—I emailed the link to Ralph, saying, parenthetically, "I know you love books." Here's his reply, which came in yesterday morning:

Michael,

Apropos your invitation I will respond by adding that now, 20 years later, the digital revolution is coming of age in the truest sense. We are beginning to understand exactly what the net does and does not do... Obviously many forms of communication and research have been massively enhanced via electronic media. However it seems that the photography book is holding strong. Very strong indeed. Let's examine why this is the case.

I believe that the alchemy of light on film informs a kind of content that is not remotely duplicated by electronic imaging systems. These systems transfer information with great precision but a silver gelatin photograph transcends the subject and leads one into much higher levels of content. For this reason the photograph per se remains firmly positioned in the social aesthetic matrix.

The exact same is true of the photography book. Issues such as tactility, luminosity and rhythm on the printed page are not in any way equaled by the image on the digital display.

I don't want to sound like one of those cave-men who resented the invention of papyrus...I own several computers and love doing the layout and scans for my books as well as composing music and burning CDs etc. It's all great. I only want to state clearly that the book will surely prevail....

I only hope that these sentiments are shared by future generations.

Ever Onwards!

Ralph Gibson

Of major photographers, Ralph Gibson is even more closely identified than most with the printed page. He founded Lustrum Press in 1970 to publish his own work as well as a series of "process-oriented" technical books and monographs by other photographers, the most famous (or infamous) of which was probably Larry Clark's pioneering portrait of the drug underworld, Tulsa, reprinted in 2000 by Grove Press. Along the way, he helped make the reputations of a number of photographers who are well established now, such as Mary Ellen Mark.

A spread from Ralph Gibson's 1973 book Déjà-vu. Photo courtesy CCP.

There was a show at the Center for Creative Photography in 2007 called "Ralph Gibson and Lustrum Press, 1970–1984" which chronicled Gibson's influence as a publisher.

Where his own work is concerned, Ralph Gibson works through the medium of books—with design, sequencing, and juxtaposition—such that his printed books are essentially single artworks. Ironically, though, his website has an archive of his work that is more comprehensive than the online gallery of almost any other photographer of his stature.

Mike

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Featured Comment by CK Dexter Haven: "I would be thrilled to have an email from Ralph Gibson. Certainly, one of my photographic 'heroes.' However, an actual letter from him would be just the cat's. Something about the luminosity of ink on paper that just can't be reproduced by pixels on screen."

H.C.-B. in Ink

By Joe Cameron

I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, but to those bemoaning  the fact that they live too far away to see the traveling Cartier-Bresson show and therefore can’t experience "original prints," I would say that some photographers' images work best, and do best what they are intended to do, on the printed page—not gallery walls. I would include most photojournalists in this category, and Cartier-Bresson is a case in point.

I appreciate seeing original work as much as anyone. One of the seminal experiences of my life was stumbling into a Rothko retrospective at the Tate many years ago. It was late on a rainy London afternoon and the paintings were lit only by somewhat faint skylight. At first I was irritated that the galleries were so dark, but after sitting for many long minutes and acclimating my eyes to the ethereal atmosphere, a vast new world opened that I shall never forget, one that cannot be duplicated in the form of a book.

Brian Forrest, Mark Rothko, Installation View (Pacific Design Center, 2007)

But I also remember hearing the photographer Ralph Gibson suggest once that the deep rich black of printer’s ink came closer to conveying his ideas than the silver of printing paper. He was glad to sell 'original prints' to collectors but he implied that the book pages holding his images were truer to his vision.

Both of these examples, however, are about how important the material which makes up the image is to its impact and communication. To the contrary, it seems to me that Cartier-Bresson’s photographs (and most photographs for that matter) attempt to bypass the vehicle of their conveyance and present the actual physical world intact. And sometimes books can pull this off more effectively than the austere walls of a gallery whose purpose is to emphasize the preciousness of objects.

So take heart—for a small sum of money (the price of a book) you can enjoy the full beauty of Cartier-Bresson’s work, at its best, and in the comfort of your own home.

Joe

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Hank Carter Coming to America!

Henri Cartier-Bresson (who sometimes Americanized his name to "Hank Carter" when traveling in America or with American friends*) will be the subject of a major show at New York City's Museum of Modern Art this spring.

MoMA, as H.C.-B. fans will recall, was the site of his first major American show, in 1947—originally planned when they thought it was going to be posthumous, as Cartier was believed to have been killed in the war (he was actually a POW). The new show will be the first Cartier-Bresson retrospective in the United States in more than thirty years.

"Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century" is in New York from April 11th through June 28th, 2010, and will then travel to The Art Institute of Chicago (where I'll be sure to catch it), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA), and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. I expect the catalog to be fantastic! (Dare we hope for a new edition of The Decisive Moment, which in 58 years has never been reissued?)

"Hank Carter" in 1972. Photo by Martine Franck.

Mike
(Thanks to Yemado)

*Bill Bresler says it's a nickname given to him by Elliott Erwitt.

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Featured Comment by Jim Metzger: "Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy!"

Featured Comment by Bill Mitchell: "He de greatest! Without question more 'great' images than any other photographer (I would guess Eisenstadt is a distant second). Let us hope that time does not diminish appreciation of his achievement."

Featured Comment by Ken Tanaka: "Indeed, this 'Hank' show is coming here to the Art Institute of Chicago in July. I know the curators here are excited. I'll probably be visiting it at MoMA in advance of its arrival here.

"—Caution: Heresy Follows. Turn Your Children Away!—But while I am eager to see the show, and Peter Galassi's catalog, I can't help feeling like this is well over-trodden ground. Cartier-Bresson's work is delightful and always enjoyable to view. But it's been published and ruminated over so many times. Plus, as it's all rather contrasty small-scale black-and-white work it's been quite well represented in dozens of finely printed books over the past 5+ decades. What undiscovered revelations could possibly remain about this man's photography?

"Doesn't popular photo worship seems just a bit stuck in Rutsville, rather like the film 'Groundhog Day'?

"Museum curators either seem to reach way back for the crowd-pleasing (and attendance-encouraging) classics like this or way out to look-at-me dreck that's at the fringes of the definition of photography (like much of MoMA's recent 'New Photography' exhibition). There's a lot of other wonderful work, past and present, out there. (Tease: With a little luck and a little more funding I hope to be able to reveal a show of just such work at the Art Institute of Chicago in the coming months.)

"Okay, I'm ready to be led to the stake for my barbequeing now. You can let the kids back at the computer."

Mike replies: I can sympathize with this view, Ken—in fact I've been mulling over writing an essay about the ways in which culture is stuck, despite our self-concept of ourselves as a society accelerating at breakneck speed into the future. In many ways I would rather see a Vivian Maier show, although maybe someday I will.

Still, art is new to people who haven't experienced it before, and it has been thirty years since he had a major retrospective here. And it's always good to see original prints. And museums still have Rembrandt and Van Gogh shows, don't they? And Turner and Miro and Franz Kline? Seeing original Rothkos is a religious experience, never mind that it's no longer anything new. I intend to enjoy the H.C.-B. show for what it is. Maybe I'll meet up with you at the Art Institute—look for a guy with a beard wearing a carnation in the lapel of his trenchcoat.

P.S. I just saw "Groundhog Day" for the first time in 2009, and loved it. Old hat to you, no doubt.

Polaroid Warholia

There's a small show of Andy Warhol Polaroids of 1970s and '80s sports stars at Danziger Projects, partly viewable online. You can also read Kathy Ryan's admiring comments at the World's Greatest Photography Magazine. (Note that this appears in a fashion section, not an arts one.)

I'm not sure I agree with her about the intrinsic merit of the photographs; seems more like celebrity culture cutting both ways, with the photos themselves left over as talismans, artifacts. Is it really so deathlessly fresh to picture Jack Nicklaus nuzzling a golf club, Ali with his shirt off, Dorothy Hamill with her skates slung around her neck? Not convinced. Of course I haven't seen the actual...artifacts. The show is up until December 12th at Danziger Gallery, 534 West 24th Street, New York City.

The vagaries of taste
I was never grabbed very hard by Polaroids per se. Taste is a strange and mysterious thing—I love snapshots, have a protean appetite for looking at them, adore books of snapshot collections (in fact I have a veritable pile of snapshot books here that I've been meaning for some time to write up in a massive group review). Show me a large enough pile of snapshots and I will find you an inadvertent masterpiece, with all the charm and magic that only serendipity can create. 

Above are two samples from a new group that Rodger Kingston recently uploaded to his SmugMug page of his Kingston collection. Of course we're not looking at "mere" snapshots there, but expertly chosen ones. Rodger is a rare connoisseur; his selections are, in effect, edited. Curated. I'm not saying "found" ephemera and snapshots are all I'd want to look at. Still, I have great natural affection for that stuff.

You'd think I'd love Polaroids. And I'm not saying I don't appreciate the high points—I think of Jamie Livingston's great archive, preserved by Hugh Crawford. You can't help but be moved by that. And yet, I've been meaning to write—trying to write—trying to find the right things to say—about The Impossible Project for some time now, and the words have a hard time coming. The only thing that come easily to mind are flip jokes about the appropriateness of the name. The project seems quixotic even to me, and I'm a very impractical guy.

Roped in
And the other day, when I bought PHOTO:BOX at Stan Banos's recommendation, Amazon's "Frequently Bought Together" come-on roped me in, and I bought The Polaroid Book along with it. It should be the kind of book I'd just love. Another copious, well-made, almost ridiculously high-value book (I mean, for less than eleven bucks, they're giving this away—it is a very generous and well-made book for that price—or twice or three times that price). It's part of Benedikt Taschen's 25th Anniversary Special Editions series (his is a story in itself). It has an incisive Introduction by the last Director of The Polaroid Collections, Barbara Hitchcock, and the selection of pictures is an embarrassment of riches. To circle around to where this started, there is even a Polaroid of Andy Warhol wielding his Big Shot. And yet, I've paged through The Polaroid Book three times now, and can't sort out how to feel about it. I like it. I just don't love it.

There's something so self-conscious about Polaroids....

It doesn't seem enough to say that anyone who loves Polaroids should own it. I know there are people who really love Polaroids, who are genuinely excited about, and fervently hopeful for, The Impossible Project. Here's where I need a guest reviewer, someone with deep, real enthusiasm for that particular medium. Maybe I should ask Hugh....

Mike

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Featured Comment by charlie: "I have owned The Polaroid Book in its last release for I think four years. Since then, it has become my go-to book when I need a good dose of pure photography. Were I forced to choose just three photo books to have for eternity , this one would be in that list. I also prefer the cover as it mimics the old Polaroid logo and packaging."

Mike replies: Now you're making me feel bad...what's wrong with me, anyway?

Featured Comment by Sean Murphy: "I'm trying to decide, was it instant photography or Polaroids that I loved. I love slides and instant photographs, because they are the actual picture. Made right in your camera that you can view directly without intervening tools and tech. But the slide still had to be developed somewhere else in space and time. With instant, the alchemy of the darkroom tray happened in broad daylight as you watched, right in your hand! Its getting hard to appreciate in our digital-camera-wifi-upload-to-the-web times, the satisfaction of making a picture on the spot that you could give to a friend or family member on the spot.

"Shooting with folding Polaroids using 'wink lights' and 3000 speed B&W that you had to rub that acrid fixer on, the sleek metal and leather of the SX-70 and pack film that always came with fresh batteries, sometimes morphing the image with a stylus for goofy effects, waving the print by the white tab at the bottom, as if that would make it develop faster, all the variations that came after down to the cameras for kids that shot little Polaroid stickers.... I guess I do love Polaroids, they were just plain fun!"

Featured Comment by Hugh Crawford: "Well Mike since you handed me that can of worms and that fine looking can-opener...

"As a fan and for many years a user of Polaroid, a big fan of Andy Warhol and his work, and sort of an obsessive about on-axis and penumbral lighting, I thought I'd like the Warhol show at the Danziger Gallery more, but it didn't do that much for me. The best thing about it was that it was that it is right across the street from the Bruce Davidson show at the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, 505 West 24th Street. that show is quite wonderful. It's an interesting show to view with the Robert Frank show up at the Met.

"Odd coincidence number one: today's photo on my wife's blog otbkb.com was taken walking out of that gallery last Friday.

"Maybe it's the white seamless backgrounds or something, but those Big Shot photos look a little to much like they were made with a photocopier or a stat camera. Writing that down makes me think 'of course Andy wanted to become a photocopier, well duh...', but the qualities of the Big Shot pictures shot against white seamless that are so good when they are made into silkscreen paintings just don't do a whole lot for me in their original form.

"It's funny, I took a lot of photos of Warhol, and I took a lot of Polaroids of artists , but no Polaroids of Warhol.

"Odd coincidence number 2: a video of Andy Warhol and Truman Capote taken while I was photographing them showed up on youtube recently; I think it was maybe my first job after college. 

Hugh photographing Warhol not with a Polaroid. Note Alfred Stieglitz moustache.

"As for Polaroids in general, for me a lot of what makes them interesting it that they straddle the boundary of being an image and an object. Unlike most modern photographic prints, a Polaroid is fixed in its final form in the context of its making. A Polaroid portrait has most often been held by its subject at the time of its creation. These are qualities that Polaroids share with Daguerreotypes and wetplate collodion processes like tintypes and ambrotypes, but I think that the quality of the Polaroid being an artifact possibly held by its subject is much stronger with the Polaroids.

"The other interesting thing about Polaroids is not so much that they are imperfect and idiosyncratic visual interpretations of the world (because all photographic processes are imperfect and idiosyncratic visual interpretations of the world) but that the success of the Polaroid practitioner depends on anticipating and committing to that translation before the moment of exposure.

"Conventional late 20th century photo processes all allow or even demand a considerable amount of post exposure manipulation and visualization, and digital photography demands even more, whereas Polaroid demands that all decisions about the image be made prior to exposure.

"I just happen to be in the midst of cataloging another Polaroid based project (it's Mnemonic, it's Mimetic, and it's Memetic!) that encompasses all of this.

"Odd coincidence number 3: Andrew Lampert, Czar of the Cosmic Baseball Association, figures mnemonically in the the Robert Frank show, the Jamie Livingston Project, and this other thing I'm working on."

Featured Comment by Bill Poole: "I love The Polaroid Book, and I have always loved Polaroids for many of the reasons already mentioned. They hold a fascination as one-of-a-kind objects, like Daguerreotypes and tintypes. And they do have a view-camera-like quality, since the image is recorded full-sized. And then there is that soft color, which Cosindas exploited so expertly—Portra-like before Portra came along. Ya gotta love it—I did, and my Polaroids from the '70s are among my favorite images (and not just because my friends all look so young in them)."

Random Excellence: Stephen Gillette

Stephen Gillette, Tondi (Big Sur #13), pigment on mulberry paper, 11.75 x 8.25"

By rights, these shouldn't work, and I guess I'm not sure all of them do, at least not equally. But some of them sure do. As a friend of mine once said, "it's not the idea, it's how it looks." If you live near Big Sur, you can see them. Here's the scoop, and some more.

(By the bye, I think the prettiest one is #5, but Eolake already posted that one on his blog, so I'm not going to ditto it. Take a look at all of them and pick your own favorite.)

Mike

Peregrinations on the East Side with Art

I got to meet John Dominis last Saturday. I had lunch with my friend Art Elkon, who then took me around to the VP Gallery on East Buffalo Street in the Third Ward. VP specializes in the work of LIFE magazine photographers; gallery owner Bill Appleby told me his is one of eight galleries worldwide that does. I think it was eight—maybe it was four. (Numbers mean little to me. I have trouble remembering my own phone number.) The gallery's reception for for the artist was in progress.

I asked John, who was a longtime staffer for LIFE (you can see a picture of him here, taken by Marc Riboud) if his picture of the Black Panther salute by runners Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the Olympic Summer Games in Mexico City in 1968 was his most famous picture. He was quiet, then allowed as how that one "wasn't much, as a photograph." He named his (also well known) Donner Pass picture as one of his own favorites.

John Dominis, Southern Pacific Steam Engine, Donner Pass, California, 1949

There were fifteen or eighteen pictures of John's on view, and he said he could have put up just as strong a show with fifteen or eighteen entirely different ones. I made some sort of assenting noise, and he added that that couldn't go on forever—he said he probably didn't have more than a hundred or so pictures of the same quality, from a whole career.

Most of his pictures, for those who are interested in such things, were taken with a Leica and a 35mm lens. (The Donner pass picture looked like medium format to me, although I didn't ask.)

One of John's cover shots from 1964, reprised in 2004
(note Photoshopping of Ringo's head)

 

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My own favorite of John's was one of the few pictures in the gallery that was new to me, of Mickey Mantle descending into the dugout and flinging his batting helmet aside in disgust after striking out. And not just because I like seeing Yankees frustrated (although there's that). A great classic 35mm shot.

John Dominis, Mickey Mantle Having a Bad Day at Yankee Stadium, New York, 1965

Another picture in the gallery that I'd never seen before—with photo geek interest, even—was a great shot by Bob Gomel of Malcolm X taking a picture of Muhammed Ali (then Cassius Clay) in a club after Clay's victory over Sonny Liston. You can see that one here. There was also a gorgeous large print of Margaret Bourke-White's famous DC-4 shot on sale for a cool $42,000. TOP isn't quite that successful just yet, so I had to leave that one on the wall, but it was nice to see. Bill explained to me that the print takes many hours to spot, because there are lines running through the middle of it, owing to the fact that the negative was once stored folded in half!

After the VP gallery, Art and I went around to Debra Brehmer's Portrait Society Gallery, where Art himself had some pictures up. Debra had asked him to take some general establishing shots for an exhibit of Ringo White's collage assemblies, which are made entirely of detritus Ringo finds on beaches. Art's lakescapes were taken with his trusty Canon G9, and looked great printed big.

Art Elkon with his trusty G9 at the Portrait Society Gallery, Milwaukee, Fall 2009

As a final note about all this, Bill Appleby thinks that the weighty tome The Great LIFE Photographers (it's the size of a small phone book—despite which, the reproduction quality is quite good) is the single best one-volume book on the subject, and for a limited time he's offering copies signed by John Dominis for $70 each. Contact Bill if you're interested. I believe he said John will be doing the autographing on the tenth, so contact Bill before then if you want one.

(Also, just FYI, the book will be coming out in paperback soon.)

A nice "day off." It's always a good day for me whenever I get to look at real prints.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Jim Hart: "I'm of an age where there's not much I look at and say 'If I had the money, I'd have that.' Mostly it's better to want something than to actually have it, I've found.

"Usually it's some type of automobile (which explains the C5 Corvette that was in the garage for awhile; I didn't have money, but it turns out I did have the credit line).

"But Ms. Bourke-White is my all time favorite photographer and if I had the money that print would be on the wall, along with a number of her other works.

"I have no idea why her work hits me where I live, and it's probably better that I don't know—but man, she just rocked.

"Just my 2 cents.

"Which leaves me $41,999.98 short."

French Government has Oeuf on Face

The French government has egg on its face over an archive of rare and extremely valuable Henri Cartier-Bresson prints that it lost not once, but twice—some of which are now resurfacing on the private art market.

According to an article in The Independent, it seems Cartier-Bresson gave 551 vintage prints to the French government, most of which came from a 1955 exhibition at the Louvre Museum in Paris. Some were made by the photographer himself—unusual because, for most of his career, he had other people make his prints for him. (He was, or claimed he was, allergic to darkroom chemicals*.)

The archive was later discovered to be severely damaged by water leaks in the basement of the museum facility where they were being stored. Reluctantly, after inspecting the damage in 1991, Cartier-Bresson agreed that the prints should be destroyed.

Ten years later, Cartier-Bresson recognized a print from the archive being offered for private sale. He made a formal complaint, and the sale was stopped.

Since the photographer's death in 2004, more of the supposedly "destroyed" prints have been showing up on the art market. Where did they come from? Nobody seems to know. The Cartier-Bresson foundation has formally demanded that the French government admit that it did not destroy the prints; the French government says the prints now turning up must have come from some other souce. (I'll trust Martine Franck, Cartier-Bresson's widow, who recognizes the prints as having come from the archive.)

There's plenty of motive for skullduggery: a single one of these prints can be worth more than a quarter of a million dollars.

Pass les oeufs, please. Plenty of shamefulness to go around.

Read the article here.

Mike

*I sympathize—I'm allergic to washing dishes.

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Featured Comment by Andre Moreau: "For those who read French, here's the original article from the Le Monde newspaper."

The AIPAD Show 2009

Regular readers will probably already know that the AIPAD Show (AIPAD is the Association of International Photography Art Dealers—say "AY-pad") is going on in New York City this weekend, at the Park Avenue Armory.

The AIPAD Show is the "other" North American trade show for photography. Enthusiasts, pros and equipment geeks are all over the VISCOMM Show at the Javits Center, which is the trade show for gear 'n' "stuff," but relatively few know about the AIPAD Show, which is the trade show for pictures.

Imagine a hundred or so photography galleries from all around the world renting booths in the same exhibition hall and bringing all their best, most salable stuff, both historical and contemporary, to display and sell, and you've about got the gestalt. But not before adding seminars, talks by famous photographers (Bruce Davidson, whose books we were discussing recently, is one of the presenters this year), and "exhibitions within the exhibition," including one this year that features treasures from the George Eastman House collection. It's a trade show, and dealers, collectors, and museums (well, curators) are quietly conducting business in the background, but there's a huge cornucopia of original work on display for the casual browser as well. (The cover of the illustrated catalog from the 2009 show is shown at right.)

Naturally the risk is that most of the work you'll see is work that is proven to be salable, so it's more of a "greatest hits" parade and not the best place to get a handle on recent, new, and innovative work, but the sheer volume of work on display means you get to see a little bit of everything.

For instance this year Charles Schwartz Ltd. is offering a rare silver-gelatin print of W. Eugene Smith's famous "In the Garden," which will certainly be priced well into six figures.

 

W. Eugene Smith, In the Garden

This is also the weekend for my annual vow to attend the AIPAD Show the next year, which I never do. (This year I even have airline miles that are about to expire, and I am kicking myself, hard, for not putting those two things together. Ow.) But I hereby dutifully so vow. Set up that football, Lucy, I'm a-comin'.

The DLK Collection blog is there and doing a booth review, spilling the beans on prices, too, which is interesting. Here's the link to Part 1, but be sure to check for updates. Here's the New York Times review.

Mike
(Thanks to John Camp)

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ADDENDUM: The proper title of the Smith picture is "The Walk to Paradise Garden," as Scott Kirkpatrick has pointed out in the comments.

Featured Comment by Michael W: "Even better coverage by James Danziger who also has a booth at the show."

Danziger Projects booth, The AIPAD Show, NYC, 2009

Carleton Watkins and the Getty

By John Camp

Of the major art museums in the United States, few could possibly be as big a pain in the butt to get to as the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Built on a mountainside over a screaming freeway, you plunge down the exit, circle around and under the freeway, pay the $10 parking fee, lose your car in a gargantuan underground garage (write the parking level on the palm of your hand, or you may never see your Camaro again) and then wait in a Disney World-style line for a tram that runs up and down the mountain. Slowly, up and down the mountain.

The latter part of this journey is accompanied by shoals of rugrats on school excursions who, upon inspection, seem to be learning nothing whatever about art, or anything else, while efficiently preventing any possibility of quiet contemplation of the museum’s paintings, prints and photographs. (Yes, I have not only children, but grandchildren, God bless them all, and keep the little ones out of the art museums until they’re at least eleven, is what I say; and for those twelve- to sixteen-year-old hormonal cases, a carefully chosen display of Helmut Newton prints should keep them occupied, quiet, and possibly even inspired.)

Over the years, I’ve been to the Getty a dozen times, and it never seems to get better. I wouldn’t even go, except for the glorious “Young Italian Woman at a Table,” by Paul Cezanne and an excellent sea painting (Van Tromp, Going About to Please His Masters, Ships a Sea, Getting a Good Wetting, by J.M.W. Turner, above), and a few others.

On Friday, I visited a dozen or so paintings and then went down in the basement to look at the “Dialogue Among Giants: Carleton Watkins and the Rise of Photography in California.” For lack of a better phrase, Watkins was a man-and-nature photographer working generally out of the San Francisco area from the 1850s through the 1890s.

Much to my amazement—and I can’t guarantee this was true—it seemed to me that the Watkins galleries were as crowded as the European painting galleries, possibly because the show was to end a couple of days later. As is the case with many photography shows, there were too many photographs on display, not all of them in pristine condition, well-printed, or well-photographed.

But that’s a quibble: they were fascinating. (And large: Watkins worked mostly with mammoth plates, up to 18x22 inches.)

Carleton Watkins, Primitive Mining. The Old Rocker (self-portrait as a miner), c. 1876.
Collection of the Society of California Pioneers, The National Gallery of Art

Watkins seems to have anticipated several strands of documentary photography, such as the early workman/industrial photography by Lewis Hine or August Sander, with his photos of lumberjacks and miners, taken on location, with their tools. The brutality of their labor is clearly written on their faces and in their bodies: you could throw Jacob Riis and the WPA photographers in the influence-mix, as well. Watkins even anticipated contemporary environmental photography, with his images of the tremendous damage done by hydraulic gold mining in the California mountains.

'Adams was a trained and self-conscious artist, while Watkins was more akin to a reporter'

Most notably, though, he took pictures of the wilderness, and especially Yosemite. I knew that Yosemite had been extensively photographed before Ansel Adams, of course, but wasn’t aware to the extent that Watkins had anticipated all of Adams’ great themes—the high walls, the waterfalls, the serpentine rivers with the light playing across them.

Adams had better equipment, of course, and, I think, a better eye. Watkins (who worked first with daguerreotypes and later with glass plates, out of a darkroom built into a wagon) tended to go for an almost academic, or just simple, composition—the river leading into the distance, the carefully placed foreground/background items to define a scenic view, the high viewpoint looking across the deep valley. It seemed to me that he “went there and took the picture,” whatever the picture was when he got there.
Adams, on the other hand, apparently had an idea of what the photograph should look like, and then went back repeatedly to the same places, until nature cooperated and provided him with that image. The two approaches are quite different, probably because Adams was a trained and self-conscious artist, while Watkins was more akin to a reporter.

One especially interesting aspect of the show was a 360-degree panorama (I believe of San Francisco), by Eadweard Muybridge, who later became famous for his stop-action photos of horses and then human beings. The literature provided by the Getty suggests that Watkins was Muybridge’s mentor; and Watkins took a photograph of Muybridge seated beneath a Giant Redwood. Watkins also began shooting panoramas before Muybridge, and may have taught something of the technique to the younger man.

The Muybridge panorama especially caught my eye because it was an example of an early multiple (13 separately-framed shots) that seemed to anticipate his later multiple studies, which were done in time, rather than space—but you can see the idea forming on the wall. Muybridge’s biggest failing, of course, was that he had too many vowels in his first name.

The Watkins show is over, but if you’re in L.A. and want to go to the Getty, there’s no admission charge to the museum. However, parking is pretty much mandatory—Daniel Boone couldn’t walk into the place—and costs $10 per car.

The museum website is here.

Carleton Watkins in Yosemite is available in hardcover through Amazon. Here's the U.K. link.

John

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Featured Comment by Daniel Jansenson: "Regarding parking: you can also take the Metro Rapid bus (line 761), for $1.25. More info here." [WARNING: link is a .PDF download.  —Ed.]

Featured Comment by thompsonkirk: "On the theme of Watkins: Don't miss Wild Beauty: Photographs of the Columbia River Gorge, 1867-1957 by Terry Toedtemeier (the late curator of photography at the Portland Art Museum) and John Laursen. Beautiful reproductions of Watkins' and later photographers' work in Oregon's Columbia Gorge."