Book Review- Carleton Watkins: Making the West American By- Tyler Green
Carleton Watkins: Making The West American - By Tyler Green - Published by The University of California Press
By Timothy LeBlanc
In Carleton Watkins: Making the West American, published by the University of California press in 2018, author Tyler Green, the journalist behind “The Modern Art Notes” podcast, tells the story not just of the artist, Watkins, but also of the power of ideas and how art can come to affect the course of history. Green uses Watkins as a pivot point to look at those with whom he surrounded himself and their importance to the United States. It is clearly about the photographer but can teach so much about the history of California, Transcendentalism, and western ideas of unionism.
Highlighting Watkins’ importance is an amazing feat given how little is left of personal artifacts from the artist. Just days before his archive was due to move to Stanford University, the 1906 earthquake and fire decimated San Francisco, destroying all of Watkins negatives. A reader can feel how much effort Green went through in researching the book. Green has shared, both on his podcast as well as in a great talk put on by the USC Institute of the West at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, that he did not stop at going through a litany of collections and archives, many the personal archives of those who helped shape the West with Watkins by their side. Green also gained, through multiple trips to photographic sites, an understanding of the physical spaces Watkins would have put himself in to take his grand photos. This sense of place informs the book in a variety of ways. One can experience through his writing, the harsh environments that Watkins, and Green, had to brave as well as understand just how good Watkins was at composing a shot.
This was no easy feat given the dynamics of photography at the time. Green shared how the mechanics of photography differed from today, requiring Watkins to go through a lot of work for even a small work let alone the 18” x 22” “mammoth” prints, he pioneered. He would load up a wagon to trek with hundreds of pounds of fragile roughly 18” x 22” glass plates, gallons of chemicals, and a variety of cameras over wild landscapes. He would then have to construct a workspace, along side a camp for shelter, in which he could coat the plates in those light sensitive chemicals and insert them into the specially built camera all in complete darkness. Each exposure, most likely done in the early morning to avoid winds, would take minutes to produce. After that, the journey would have to go in reverse, whether from nearby Yosemite or Oregon, to get those plates back to San Francisco for printing into the wonderful images we have today.
From the late 1850s when Watkins started shooting pictures of the West, most notably California, to the 1890s when he stopped due to losing his eyesight, he stood as tall as the sequoias which he photographed. If Watkins was the magnificent trees of California, those figures that he was surrounded by were the landmarks of the Yosemite Valley that held them. Green is able to show how Watkins himself, or his images in proxy, influenced or helped spread the ideas of the politician John C. Fremont, the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, the scientist Asa Gray, the great American landscape painter Albert Bierstadt, and so many more.
While Green provides a thorough discussion of Watkins’ aesthetic values, his most original idea is the role of Watkins in Cultural Unionism. In short, this is the idea that California, and in general the West, was in part aligned with the Union through art, writing, and higher cultural sensibilities. Green highlights an 1860 speech given by Edward Baker, one of America’s first Republican senators and the only senator to die in battle when, a year after this speech, he was shot while fighting for the Union, in which Baker declared,
In much that makes up national greatness and excellence, [the South] are lamentably deficient. In deep philosophy, in inspired poetry, they are lacking. The books we write, they read, the lectures we deliver, they hear; [George] Bancroft and [William H.] Prescott write their history for them, [William] Bryant and [Henry Wadsworth] Longfellow their poetry.
Green highlights that Baker gave this speech to a packed house at the 2,000 seat American Theater. It is known that many of those around Watkins were present, including Jessie Benton Fremont, Thomas Starr King, and the poet Bret Harte. Baker’s use of “We” connected the West to the North. At various points, Green discusses Watkins’ photos much like Baker talks about those writers. The intellectuals of the West sent photographs and writing back to the North, changing the perspective of California from the Wild West into a place of hope and learning.
Watkins’ photography helped shape some of the nation’s most influential ideas and thinkers through this exchange. His works went out to Asa Gray, a Harvard teacher and considered by many to be the most important botanist of the era. They went to Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of Americas most important philosophers and abolitionists, who become such a friend that, when Emerson’s son came to California, he stayed with Watkins. They went to senators and to the White House, directly influencing the formation of the national park system. Green in Carleton Watkins: Making the West American speaks to all of this and so much more. I recommend everyone go out and get a copy.