Walking through the Getty Museum’s “Dialogue Among Giants” exhibit is like walking through a mystery, finding clues here and there, each revealing something about the artistic history of featured photographer, Carleton Watkins. In the exhibit, running through March 1, a number of Watkins’ photographs are grouped with earlier unattributed photographs that the curator claims Watkins may have taken.
“Dialogue Among Giants: Carleton Watkins and the Rise of Photography in California” is a collection of Watkins’ photographs of California, and creates a history of his work not previously compiled.
Senior curator of photographs, Weston Naef, used clues he found over several years of research to create this exhibit, an attempt to uncover the mysterious beginnings of the great photographer.
“This is what the process of art history is all about … how you follow these clues to lead you to ideas about who could have made the picture,” he said.
Watkins moved to California from New York in 1850 and from there began an impressive career in photography. His thousands of pieces provide a unique portrait of California during and after the Gold Rush.
The exhibit is made up of Watkins’ photos of Yosemite, panoramas of San Francisco, the Pacific Coast landscape and other images of railroads, missions, hotels, native trees and massive rocks and lakes.
Naef’s curiosity about Watkins’ earlier work sparked from the fact that in 1861 the photographer emerged suddenly, creating work that was “so magnificent and so arresting that he became famous around the world almost overnight.”
Naef was convinced that Watkins, practically unknown previous to these 30 pieces, had made earlier pieces that built up to this sudden work of genius.
“This exhibition came about because I believed that Carleton Watkins had a significant career in photography before he took a camera that weighed 75 pounds, with a lens that weighed 30 pounds, brought it up to Yosemite, put it in places that were really hard to get to and made these magnificent pictures,” said Naef.
“So the question nagged: What did he do that allowed him to be visually so sophisticated?”
The photos were so sophisticated, in fact, that they were sent to New York and he became the first artist with roots in California to be shown in New York City.
So began Naef’s research into what Watkins created previous to these immediately renowned photographs. The answer, he discovered, was in daguerreotypes, or early photographs made on sheets of sliver paper.
In a biography on Watkins, written in 1916, Naef found this single clue, a sentence that read: “Carleton Watkins made the daguerreotypes.” Naef went on to find these unknown pieces, looking at all daguerreotypes that were made in California during that time in order to find pieces related to Watkins’ later work.
He found several unattributed photos with undeniable similarities to Watkins’ style. These photos are attributed to Watkins in the exhibit.
“As I began to compare this to this … I said to myself, “˜This picture and this picture had to made by the same person,'” said Naef.
In this way the exhibit is a thesis statement about the motivations and history of Watkins’ work, as Naef attributed to Carleton Watkins numerous unattributed photographs.
Although the exhibition’s purpose is to present what Naef calls “the magnificent body of work that this man made over 40 years,” it is also an attempt to better understand Watkins and his earlier photography.
“The sub-theme that runs through the exhibition based upon the idea that he had to start someplace, and this exhibition would be a way that we could try to figure out where he started,” he said.
For example, one of Watkins’ earlier photographs, “Oso House, Bear Valley” (1860), is taken of a small hotel and a group of people seen from a diagonal perspective, that is taken late in the day. In the exhibit, Naef attributed a number of daguerreotypes to Watkins because of their similar content: small hotel, group of people, taken from the same perspective at the same time of day.
By attributing such photographs to Watkins, the exhibit takes a bold stance and becomes a portrait not just of California but of the man behind the camera.
“There is a lot that we don’t know and can’t prove,” said Naef, “but that we can infer from the sequence of events that are taking place.”