Carleton Watkins 1829-1916

A couple things stuck my fancy about Watkins photographs. One was how he captured the essence or feeling of the Western American landscape he was photographing. I get the sense that he could feel the natures beauty and energy flowing through him and it does the same to me when I look at his photographs. If a scenery is beautiful anybody can snap a quick shot and have a pretty picture, but I love how he is able to but some feeling or connection with the land into his pictures. I myself being outdoors and being in nature, and I love the Western American landscape and culture. Someday I will be moving to the West for both of those reasons. Watkins lived in New York, and began traveling the west in search of gold like many other people of his time. Throughout his career his won numerous awards, but his landscape photographs received awards from Paris! Even though he won many awards and was highly recognized, he was not a good business man, so in 1875 he lost his studio as well as he negatives to J.J. Cook. He did not just sit around an pout though, be restock his negatives by retraveling the west, and calling then Watkins New Series. Eventually he published more than 2300 New Series titles. An earthquake in 1906 destroyed in studio and all of his negatives were lost. But, there is good news! Some of his prints are now in some private and institutional collections even thought the prints were lost. The types of images I love most from Watkins, are him images of trees. I have a strange fascination with trees that i probably inherited from my dad. One of his favorite holiday is strangely enough Arbor Day. Watkins has some amazing photographs of some magnificent trees like the images above.