Overexposed: Whiteness and the landscape photography of Carleton Watkins

Oxford Art Journal

Volumn 26, Issue 1, 2003, Pages

  Berger, Martin A ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 62649128543     PISSN: 01426540     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/oaj/26.1.1     Document Type: Review

References (69)

1. Watkins' testimony is quoted in Peter E. Palmquist, Carleton E. Watkins: Photographer of the American West (University of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque, 1983), p. 9;
2. also see Douglas R. Nickel (ed.), Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception (Harry N. Abrams: New York, 1999), pp. 21, 216.
3. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1991), pp. 169-83.
4. F. V. Hayden, Sun Pictures of Rocky Mountain Scenery (J. Bien: New York, 1870)
5. quoted in Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (Hill and Wang: New York, 1989), p. 131.
6. Despite the attention devoted to whiteness by scholars of literature, history, and film, few historians of nineteenth-century American art have considered questions surrounding the construction of the white race. For a sophisticated exception, see Bruce Robertson, 'Who's Sitting at the Table? William Sidney Mount's After Dinner (1834)', Yale Journal of Criticism, vol. 11, no. 1, Spring 199S, pp. 103-7.
7. During the 1860s and 1870s, Watkins' images of the West competed against those produced by a number of talented photographers of local and national fame, including Charles Leander Weed, Nathan M. Klain, John James Riley, Thomas C. Roche, Alexander Gardner, Timothy O'Sullivan, Mathew Brady, and even Eadweard Muybridge. In Palmquist, Carleton E. Watkins, pp. 23-4 and 53.
8. Josiah Dwight Whitney to William Henry Brewer, 5 July 1866, Brewer-Whitney Correspondence, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, quoted in Palmquist, Carleton E. Watkins, p. 27.
9. For a discussion of how Europeans came during the Enlightenment to prize those natural formations deemed singular, see Barbara Maria Stafford, Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760-1840 (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1984).
10. Report of the Commissioners to Manage the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove for the Years 1866-7 (Towne and Bacon: San Francisco, 1868), p. 12.
11. Amy Rule outlines Watkins' preference for installing his photographs in dense hangings whenever possible. In Amy Rule (ed.), Carleton Watkins: Selected Texts and Bibliography (G. K. Hall & Co.: Boston, 1993), p. 22.
12. James Mason Hutchings, 'California for Waterfalls!', Mariposa Gazette, 16 August 1855
13. reprinted in David Robertson, Yosemite as We Saw It: A Centennial Collection of Early Writings and Art (Yosemite Association: San Francisco, 1990), p. 213 (emphasis original);
14. J. H. Beadle, The Undeveloped West; or Five Years in the Territories (National Publishing Company: Philadelphia, 1873), p. 278;
15. John S. Hittell, Yosemite: Its Wonders and Its Beauties (H. H. Bancroft and Company: San Francisco, 1868), p. 10.
16. For a list of the disparate groups who left names for Yosemite's natural features, as well as a detailed etymological discussion of European-American names, see Peter Browning, Yosemite Place Names: The Historic Background of Geographic Names in Yosemite National Park (Great Western Books: Lafayette, CA, 1988).
17. Despite the efforts of federal troops, there was a nearly continuous native presence in the valley from the 1850s until the late 1990s. Robert H. Keller and Michael F. Turek provide one of the few accounts of the relationship between Native Americans and the US National Park system. They note that Yosemite 'provided the worst possible scenario for Indian/white relations'. In American Indians and National Parks (University of Arizona Press: Tucson, 1998), pp. 20-2.
18. For more on the valley's original inhabitants and their culture, see Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (Oxford University Press: New York and Oxford, 1999), pp. 101-32;
19. Margaret Sanborn, Yosemite: Its Discovery, its Wonders, and its People (Random House: New York, 1981).
20. Stephen Powers, Tribes of California in J. W. Powell (ed.), Contributions to North American Ethnology, 3 vols (Government Printing Office: Washington, 1877) vol. 3, pp. 361-8.
21. For additional examples of the difficulty experienced by European-Americans in translating the Native American names of Yosemite's features, see J. D. Whitney, Geological Survey of California (Julius Bien: New York, 1868), pp. 16-17;
22. S. A. Barrett, 'Myths of the Southern Sierra Miwok', American Archaeology and Ethnology, vol. 16, no. 1, 27 March 1919, pp. 26-7.
23. Whitney, Geological Survey, p. 15.
24. E. R. Wallace, Descriptive Guide to the Adirondacks and Handbook of Travel (American News Company: New York, 1875), p. 132;
25. see also The Tourist's Guide Book to the United States and Canada (G. P. Putnam's Sons: New York, 1883), pp. 79 and 198.
26. For similar descriptions of the Catskills, see S. S. Colt, The Tourist's Guide Through the Empire State (privately printed: Albany, 1871), pp. 160 and 162.
27. Browning, Yosemite Place Names, p. xi.
28. For a nineteenth-century European-American account of the supposed indifference of Native Americans toward Yosemite's grandeur, see Frederick Law Olmsted, 'The Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Trees: A Preliminary Report', Landscape Architecture, vol. 43, 1952, p. 22.
29. For more on the myth of Indians' fear of nature, see Keller and Turek, American Indians and National Parks, pp. 24, 94, and 236.
30. Hittell, Yosemite, p. 10.
31. Chris J. Magoc, Yellowstone: The Creation and Selling of an American Landscape, 1870-1903 (University of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque, 1999), p. 13.
32. Rebecca Bedell, The Anatomy of Nature: Geology and American Landscape Painting, 1825-1875 (Princeton University Press: Princeton and Oxford, 2001), p. 125.
33. James O'Gorman, H. H. Richardson: Architectural Forms for an American Society (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1987), p. 94; also see pp. 91-111.
34. See Kevin Michael DeLuca and Anne Teresa Demo, 'Imaging Nature: Watkins, Yosemite, and the Birth of Environmentalism', Critical Studies in Mass Communication, vol. 17, no. 2, 2000, pp. 241-61.
35. For the first sustained discussion of the economic links between Watkins' photographs of nature and industry, see George Dimock, Exploiting the View: Photographs of Yosemite & Mariposa by Carleton Watkins (Park-McCullough House: North Bennington, VT, 1984).
36. In A. L. Bancroft, Bancroft's Tourist's Guide: Yosemite, San Francisco, and Around the Bay, (South) (A. L. Bancroft & Company: San Francisco, 1871), p. xiii.
37. For essays noting the photographer's contradictory mixing of nature and industry, see Maria Morris Hambourg, 'Carleton Watkins: An Introduction,' and Douglas R. Nickel, 'An Art of Perception' in Nickel (ed.), Carleton Watkins, pp. 13 and 27;
38. Weston Naef and James N. Wood, Era of Exploration: The Rise of Landscape Photography in the American West, 1860-1885 (Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Buffalo and New York, 1975), p. 85.
39. For sophisticated discussions of how Watkins' images are wedded to an ideology of development, see Martha Sandweiss' foreword in Palmquist, Carleton E. Watkins; and Amy Rule (ed.), Carleton Watkins.
40. Alfred Runte, National Parks: The American Experience (University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, 1979), pp. 63-4; also see p. 31.
41. See also Richard West Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History (Yale University Press: New Haven, 1997), pp. 22-7.
42. John H. Hittell, The Resources of California Comprising Agriculture, Mining, Geography, Climate, Commerce (A. Roman & Company: San Francisco, 1863), p. 72.
43. Hittell, Resources of California, p. vi.
44. Joseph Weed, A View of California As It Is (Bynon and Wright, Publishers: San Francisco, 1874), p. 122.
45. See Lafayette Houghton Bunnell, Discovery of the Yosemite, and the Indian War of 1851, Which Led to that Event (Fleming H. Revell: Chicago, 1880), pp. 53-62;
46. John Muir, Our National Parks (Houghton, Mifflin and Company: Boston and New York, 1901), p. 78;
47. Nathaniel Pitt Langford, The Discovery of Yellowstone Park: Journal of the Washburn Expedition to the Yellowstone and Firehole Rivers in the Year 1870 (University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, 1972 [1905]), pp. 58-9;
48. Horace Greeley, An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859 (C. M. Saxton, Barker & Co.: New York, 1860), p. 300.
49. Langford, Discovery of Yellowstone, pp. 34 and 96-7; see also p. 37.
50. Sellars, Preserving Nature, pp. 18 and 62-3. Despite Albright's efforts, the 1932 Olympics went to Lake Placid, NY and not Yosemite.
51. Frederic Law Olmsted, 'Governmental Preservation of Natural Scenery', 8 March 1890, printed circular, US Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Olmsted Papers, Box 32;
52. Olmsted, 'The Yosemite Valley', pp. 16-17.
53. Frederic Law Olmsted, A Journey through Texas; or a Saddle-Trip on the Southwestern Frontier (Dix, Edwards & Co.: New York, 1857), p. 289;
54. Frederic Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Back Country (Mason Brothers: New York, 1860), pp. 287-8.
55. Palmquist, Carleton E. Watkins, pp. 14-19.
56. Charles Roscoe Savage, Philadelphia Photographer, vol. 4, no. 45, October 1867, p. 289;
57. Oliver Wendell Holmes, 'Doings of the Sunbeam', The Atlantic Monthly, vol. 12, no. 69, July 1863, pp. 1-15.
58. Ralph Waldo Emerson quoted in Maria Morris Hambourg, 'Carleton Watkins: An Introduction' in Nickel (ed.), Carleton Watkins, p. 10.
59. For additional examples of critics' enthusiasm for Watkins' work during the 1860s, see 'California Scenery in New York', North Pacific Review, vol. 2, no. 7, February 1863, p. 208;
60. 'California Photographs', Journal of Photography and the Allied Arts and Sciences, vol. 18, no. 2, 15 May 1866, p. 21;
61. H. J. Morton, 'Yosemite Valley', Philadelphia Photographer, vol. 3, no. 36, December 1866, pp. 376-9;
62. and G. Wharton Simpson, 'Photography at the International Exhibition at Paris', Philadelphia Photographer, vol. 4, no. 43, July 1867, pp. 201-4.
63. Fitz Hugh Ludlow, The Heart of the Continent: A Record of Travel Across the Plains and in Oregon, with an Examination of the Mormon Principle (Hurd and Houghton: New York, 1870), pp. 412 and 428.
64. Not only does the missing branch on the foreground pine's trunk in The Yosemite Valley from the Best General View offer evidence that Watkins followed Weed, but comments made by Josiah Dwight Whitney during the summer of 1866 clarify that Watkins' overviews of the valley were taken both from 'Inspiration point' and 'from Weed's point of view'. Quoted in Palmquist, Carleton E. Watkins, p. 27.
65. H. J. Morton, 'Yosemite Valley', p. 377.
66. Albert Boime, The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny and American Landscape Painting, c. l830-1865 (Smithsonian Institution Press: Washington and London, 1991), pp. 21 and 1. In stressing how art historians have read the inclusion of figures in landscapes as a sign of viewers' power, I do not wish to imply that scholars are unified in the belief that the absence of figures necessarily diminishes the symbolic or narrative power of viewers.
67. For an account of how the apparent absence of a human presence communicates another kind of power, see Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825-1875 (Cornell University Press: Ithaca and London, 1993), pp. 41 and 110.
68. Boime, Magisterial Gaze, p. 151.
69. 'Views in the Yosemite Valley', Philadelphia Photographer, vol. 3, no. 28, April 1866, p. 107.