Natural Wonder

Carleton Watkins was one of those gifted but hapless figures whose life is a cautionary tale about the perils of becoming an artist. Eighty-three years after his death, and more than three decades after scholars hoisted his reputation back from the grave, he ranks among the greatest 19th century American photographers. Looking now at his pictures of Yosemite Valley or the Willamette River in Washington, it's plain how they helped create the 19th century notion of the Western landscape, so stately and sizable, as a geologic preamble to the American future, a stone tablet engraved by God. And given the high luster and detail of his prints, it's no surprise that at the height of Watkins' career his photographs won ribbons in Paris and his San Francisco studio was a tourist destination in itself.

All the same, Watkins was unsuited to the roughhouse of 19th century capitalism. Born in 1829 in rural Oneonta, N.Y., he went to California in the early 1850s in the wake of the gold rush and drifted into work in a photographer's studio. The first white explorers saw Yosemite at around the same time. Watkins, who made the earliest of several trips there in 1861, was among the first photographers to record the place in pictures that quickly secured his reputation but not his fortune. Though he would work steadily for years, mostly along the Pacific Coast, he was a feeble businessman at the best of times, and was bankrupted by the transcontinental panic of 1873. At one desperate point he was reduced to living with his family in an abandoned boxcar. Then came the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, which destroyed his studio and all the glass negatives he still possessed. He died 10 years later in a hospital for the insane.

For a long time Watkins has been one of the art world's recovered memories, though rarely recovered so handsomely as he is in "Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception," more than 150 vintage prints that make up the beautifully executed show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through Sept. 7. (In October it moves to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, then to the National Gallery of Art in Washington.) Watkins may never have thought of himself as an artist, but like Eugene Atget, the tireless chronicler of Paris neighborhoods, he came so deeply to terms with his locale that he arrived at a vision.

Before it was anything else, Watkins' work in Yosemite was a feat of mountaineering. To make pictures commensurate with the scale of the giant valley, he arranged to have an oversize wooden camera built that could hold 22-in. by 18-in. glass negatives. The plates were both heavy and fragile. Watkins and his mule teams hauled dozens of them, plus a literal ton of provisions and darkroom equipment, across the difficult routes around Half Dome and El Capitan.

Like the Western landscape painter Albert Bierstadt, Watkins made pictures that both answered to and created the 19th century American taste for grandeur in nature, especially in the vast Western spaces that were settled after the Civil War. But Bierstadt's canvases are full of painterly oratory and theatrical sunbeams. In pictures like Mirror Lake (View of Mt. Watkins), 1878-81, of a peak named for him in 1865, Watkins, who had to work with ordinary daylight and bare facts, made an art freer of pipe-organ effects. There could hardly be a more modern reduction of a natural scene than Watkins' Yosemite Falls, View from the Bottom, 1878-81, where a nearly abstract stripe of water bolts downward between mostly bare stretches of rock like one of Barnett Newman's painted zips of the 1950s.

Watkins' pictures are a precursor to the dryly spiritual portraits of Yosemite that Ansel Adams first undertook in the 1920s, though it's unlikely that Adams knew Watkins' work until much later. One difference is that Adams rarely let his scenes of nature suffer the indignities of any human presence, even after Yosemite filled up with campers and VW vans. But Watkins' clients were often industrialists who wanted to immortalize their sawmills and real estate. So in pictures like Twin Redwoods, Palo Alto, 1870, he also showed a West where nature and its unpredictable curves were giving way to right-angled sheds of industry and the straightaways of the rail line.