[ Lost in the Landscape ]

some of my favorite photographs

My visit after Christ­mas to the Getty Cen­ter had as its main des­ti­na­tion an exhibit of pho­tographs by Car­leton Watkins.

Watkins worked all over the West Coast, and was the first per­son to develop an impor­tant body of work on Yosemite. The show con­tained beau­ti­fully pre­served exam­ples of his pho­tographs, includ­ing a few that rank up there among my all-time favorite pho­tographs ever taken.

Car­leton Watkins: El Cap­i­tan, 1860s [ Library of Con­gress ]

More than one per­son has argued that Watkins is the first impor­tant artist to come out of Cal­i­for­nia, regard­less of medium, and I would not argue that point. There’s a poise and still­ness to the work. The images seem to float in their own time and space that extends to infinity.

Even after an hour in a crowded series of gal­leries, the work left me with a sense of still­ness that I still feel, over a week later. (The fact that I’m still on vaca­tion also prob­a­bly has some­thing to do with it…)

Car­leton Watkins: First View of the Yosemite Val­ley from the Mari­posa Trailca. 1866.

In the image to the left, El Cap­i­tan, the light-colored mass of gran­ite to the dis­tance in the left, bal­ances ele­gantly with the bulk of the nearer hill­side on the right. It’s an amaz­ingly for­mal, mod­ern image. I don’t know of any draw­ing, paint­ing or other pho­to­graph from up to this time that looks any­thing like it.

(This is one of two ver­sions of this image taken at the same time from the same van­tage point. I pre­fer the other ver­sion of this image, which is in the Getty show. I wasn’t able to find any­thing on the web to bor­row of either ver­sion, so this quick shot out of one of my books that at least gives you an idea of the image.)

Car­leton Watkins: Cape Horn, Colum­bia River, 1867 [ National Gallery of Art ]

I had a con­ver­sa­tion with Roy Flukinger, Cura­tor of Pho­tog­ra­phy & Film at the Harry Ran­som Human­i­ties Research Cen­ter at the Uni­ver­sity of Texas at Austin, about nine­teenth cen­tury land­scape pho­tographs. He spoke of a “tran­sub­stan­ti­a­tion” of mat­ter that occurs in many of them, where the long expo­sures and pho­to­graphic tech­niques ren­dered water, air and land to be almost equiv­a­lent mate­ri­als. In the image above, the water and sky and dis­tant moun­tains merge into each other. The cliffs to the right seem to float over the water. At the same time, they seem to fit into the rocks to the left like a key fits into a lock, or the way the shape of Africa reaches across the Atlantic to nes­tle into the empty space of the Caribbean on a map.

Car­leton Watkins: Cape Horn near Celilo, 1867 [ Met­ro­pol­i­tan Museum of Art ]

The quiet­ness and sense of infi­nite space in this one is phe­nom­e­nal. If your blood pres­sure doesn’t drop ten points after view­ing this image, noth­ing will bring it down!

Dia­logue Among Giants: Car­leton Watkins and the Rise of Pho­tog­ra­phy in Cal­i­for­nia runs until March 1.

January 03 2009 | Categories: art • landscape • photography • places | Tags: albumin prints • Carleton Watkins • Columbia River • J. Paul Getty Museum • landscape photography • Washington (State) • Yosemite | No Comments »

for a good cause

I’ve donated one of my pho­tographs to an auc­tion to ben­e­fit Yosemite Renais­sance, the orga­ni­za­tion that now over­sees the Artist-In-Residence pro­gram at Yosemite National Park. The piece below is from when I was in the park dur­ing 1997–98 as part of the program.

James SOE NYUN. Hetch-Hetchy Reser­voir from O-Shaughnessy Dam, Yosemite National Park, 1997/2007 (from the Blue Day­light Series). Archival pig­ment print [ click to enlarge ]

The auc­tions is a great oppor­tu­nity to add to or start your art col­lec­tion and help out a deserv­ing orga­ni­za­tion at the same time. The res­i­dency pro­gram is cur­rently on hia­tus as they work to upgrade a cabin that will be used by artists. The orga­ni­za­tion is count­ing on this auc­tion to help with that effort.

All auc­tion art­work will be view­able (if it’s not there already) at the auc­tion page off the main Yosemite Renais­sance home page, where you can also place bids online. Or if you pre­fer to view and bid on the work in per­son, they’ll be on exhibit at the Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite Val­ley Wednes­day and Thurs­day, August 27–28. Recep­tion and the live auc­tion will be on Thurs­day from 6 to 8 p.m.

August 16 2008 | Categories: art • photography | Tags: auctions • James SOE NYUN • Yosemite • Yosemite Renaissance | No Comments »

virtual vacations: then

In talk­ing about vis­it­ing places vir­tu­ally it’s easy to get caught up in our totally cool advanced state of tech­nol­ogy and for­get that this sort of visit-by-proxy has been going on for ages.

Homer’s Odyssey gave lis­ten­ers accounts–albeit mythical–of dis­tant worlds and peo­ples. In The Per­sian Wars Herodotus gave read­ers a more accu­rate trav­el­ogue of places they would very likely never encounter on their own.

The visual arts have always played a strong infor­ma­tional func­tion in this way. Topographically-motivated paintings–works done with vary­ing degrees of verisimilitude–go back to the early days of rep­re­sen­ta­tion, and gained a high level of pol­ish by the time of the Dutch land­scapists such as Albert Cuyp, Salomon van Ruys­dael and Jan van Goyen. Paint­ings by Canaletto, in addi­tion to being snazzy sou­venirs for wealthy trav­el­ers on the Grand Tour, gave view­ers per­spec­tively accu­rate ren­di­tions of an exotic Italy. And the list goes on…

Canaletto. Venice — Grand Canal
Look­ing South-West from the Chiesa degli Scalzi to the Fon­da­menta della Croce, with San Sime­one Pic­colo. c. 1738.
Oil on can­vas — National Gallery, Lon­don, UK.
[ source ]


When pho­tog­ra­phy came along its main-line link to real­ity and rep­u­ta­tion for truth­ful­ness kicked up the per­ceived value of its arti­facts as ways to know the world. When the pho­to­graphic stere­oview took the already hyper-real pho­to­graph and rammed it into three dimen­sions peo­ple found it rev­e­la­tory. Mil­lions of stere­oviews flooded the mar­ket, and you could take vir­tual vaca­tions to most of the known world: Egypt, South Amer­ica, Europe, the Amer­i­can West–all over.

Here are a few of my hand­ful of 1870s eBay stere­oviews of places in the west I’m par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in. If you’ve never prac­ticed “free viewing”–basically let­ting your eyes relax to the point where the left eye focuses on the left image and the right on the right one–give it a try with these. The process might be eas­ier if you click on the image to enlarge it. You know that you’re on the right track when you start to see three images, the left one on the left, the right one on the right, and the stereo com­pos­ite in between.

(Remem­ber the “Magic Eye” pic­tures from the 1990s? Those posters of seem­ingly ran­dom piles of pix­els where some sort of cheesy 3D image would sud­denly come to life when you got your eyes to relax just so? If you could make those pop, you’ve got the idea behind stereo free-viewing down.)

This first is a basic Car­leton Watkins view of Yosemite Valley:

And this is a shot of Lamon’s cabin, the “first” struc­ture built in Yosemite Val­ley. (I doubt the Native Amer­i­cans inhab­it­ing the Val­ley lived alfresco year round, how­ever…)


A South­west­ern mon­tane for­est pho­tographed by Tim­o­thy H. O’Sullivan dur­ing the 1873 Wheeler expe­di­tion, one of the great West­ern sur­veys:


And finally a shot of Kanab Canyon taken by William Bell dur­ing the 1872 Wheeler expe­di­tion. But wait! What the hell is in this pic­ture? In the finest tra­di­tion of using Google Maps to find acci­den­tally recorded images of naked peo­ple, could this be? A naked man?


Yeah, tourism and voyeurism, hand in hand, even back then…

June 19 2008 | Categories: art • landscape • photography • places • rambles | Tags: Carleton Watkins • stereoviews • Timothy H. O'Sullivan • topographical art • Wheeler Survey • William Bell • Yosemite | No Comments »