Carleton Watkins

Carleton Watkins
Author: Tyler Green
Publisher: University of California Press
Total Pages: 594
Release: 2020-10-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520377532

"[A] fascinating and indispensable book."—Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times Best Books of 2018—The Guardian Gold Medal for Contribution to Publishing, 2018 California Book Awards Carleton Watkins (1829–1916) is widely considered the greatest American photographer of the nineteenth century and arguably the most influential artist of his era. He is best known for his pictures of Yosemite Valley and the nearby Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias. Watkins made his first trip to Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove in 1861 just as the Civil War was beginning. His photographs of Yosemite were exhibited in New York for the first time in 1862, as news of the Union’s disastrous defeat at Fredericksburg was landing in newspapers and while the Matthew Brady Studio’s horrific photographs of Antietam were on view. Watkins’s work tied the West to Northern cultural traditions and played a key role in pledging the once-wavering West to Union. Motivated by Watkins’s pictures, Congress would pass legislation, signed by Abraham Lincoln, that preserved Yosemite as the prototypical “national park,” the first such act of landscape preservation in the world. Carleton Watkins: Making the West American includes the first history of the birth of the national park concept since pioneering environmental historian Hans Huth’s landmark 1948 “Yosemite: The Story of an Idea.” Watkins’s photographs helped shape America’s idea of the West, and helped make the West a full participant in the nation. His pictures of California, Oregon, and Nevada, as well as modern-day Washington, Utah, and Arizona, not only introduced entire landscapes to America but were important to the development of American business, finance, agriculture, government policy, and science. Watkins’s clients, customers, and friends were a veritable “who’s who” of America’s Gilded Age, and his connections with notable figures such as Collis P. Huntington, John and Jessie Benton Frémont, Eadweard Muybridge, Frederick Billings, John Muir, Albert Bierstadt, and Asa Gray reveal how the Gilded Age helped make today’s America. Drawing on recent scholarship and fresh archival discoveries, Tyler Green reveals how an artist didn’t just reflect his time, but acted as an agent of influence. This telling of Watkins’s story will fascinate anyone interested in American history; the West; and how art and artists impacted the development of American ideas, industry, landscape, conservation, and politics.

Carleton Watkins

Carleton Watkins
Author: Carleton E. Watkins
Publisher: Getty Publications
Total Pages: 606
Release: 2011
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 1606060058

This is an opulently illustrated catalogue of the entire remaining mammoth photographs of Carleton Watkins (1829-1916). The work will contribute not only to a fuller understanding of this pioneering photographer but also portray the barely explored frontier in its final moments of pristine beauty.

Carleton E. Watkins, Photographer of the American West

Carleton E. Watkins, Photographer of the American West
Author: Peter E. Palmquist
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 1983
Genre: Photography
ISBN:

Works of the nineteenth century photographer who focused mainly on landscape photos, and Yosemite was a favorite subject of his. His photos of the valley significantly influenced the United States Congress' decision to preserve it as a National Park.

Carleton Watkins

Carleton Watkins
Author: Stanford University. Libraries
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Columbia River
ISBN: 9780804792158

Issued in connection with an exhibition held Apr. 24-Aug. 17, 2014, Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Stanford, California.

Carleton Watkins

Carleton Watkins
Author: Douglas Robert Nickel
Publisher: San Francisco Museum
Total Pages: 228
Release: 1999-01-01
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 9780918471512

"Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception examines the signal achievement of this photographic innovator in the context of burgeoning western development and new ways of experiencing the world visually."--BOOK JACKET.

Emerson's Nature and the Artists

Emerson's Nature and the Artists
Author: Tyler Green
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2021-10-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 3791378694

Illustrated by classic American paintings and photographs, and accompanied with a prescient new appraisal, this stunning publication on Emerson’s seminal 1836 essay is at once a meditation on the ways artists influence each other and a timely cri de coeur to cherish and preserve America’s landscape. Widely considered to be the foundational text of the American landscape tradition, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature urges Americans to value and immerse themselves in their country’s landscape, to build American culture from America's nature. Nearly two centuries after the original publication of the essay Nature by Emerson, this captivating book by critic and historian Tyler Green brings together a selection of artistic works in dialog with Emerson’s text for the first time. Green also offers his own fascinating take on Nature through new research into how the essay was informed by Emerson’s experiences of art and, in turn, how it informed American art well into the twentieth century. The result is a unique melding of essay, art, and ideas that will draw new readers to Emerson’s writings, while also introducing a fresh perspective on a critical contribution to the American canon and showing what impact Emerson's text still has for the US to this day.

River of Shadows

River of Shadows
Author: Rebecca Solnit
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2004-03-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0142004103

A New York Times Notable Book Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, The Mark Lynton History Prize, and the Sally Hacker Prize for the History of Technology “A panoramic vision of cultural change” —The New York Times Through the story of the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge, the author of Orwell's Roses explores what it was about California in the late 19th-century that enabled it to become such a center of technological and cultural innovation The world as we know it today began in California in the late 1800s, and Eadweard Muybridge had a lot to do with it. This striking assertion is at the heart of Rebecca Solnit’s new book, which weaves together biography, history, and fascinating insights into art and technology to create a boldly original portrait of America on the threshold of modernity. The story of Muybridge—who in 1872 succeeded in capturing high-speed motion photographically—becomes a lens for a larger story about the acceleration and industrialization of everyday life. Solnit shows how the peculiar freedoms and opportunities of post–Civil War California led directly to the two industries—Hollywood and Silicon Valley—that have most powerfully defined contemporary society.

Westward

Westward
Author: Mark Ruwedel
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2008
Genre: Landscape
ISBN: 9780300141344

A collection of photographs taken of abandoned railroad lines, built since 1869, landforms and ruins created by the railroads including cuts, grades, collapsed tunnels and derelict trestles.

Railroad Vision

Railroad Vision
Author: Anne M. Lyden
Publisher: Getty Publications
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2003
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 9780892367269

The invention of railway transportation coincided with the invention of photography & together these innovations changed our preception of time, space & of our place in the world. Anne Lyden presents over 100 photographs with railway themes, showing how these technologies complimented each other over time.