Natural Wonder

The largest market for Watkins' pictures was the middle-class householders who bought cheap "stereographs," 3-D pictures designed to be looked at through the binocular viewers that were almost as common then as cameras are today. One of the inspirations of the San Francisco show is that it ends with a bank of computer stations where visitors can put on stereo-imaging goggles to see Watkins' pictures in a similar 3-D format. What you recognize at once is how the stereograph's explosive outward flight of space, its amazing visual suction, creates an almost palpable sense of entry into the places Watkins photographed. For 19th century Easterners ready to project their imaginations, to say nothing of themselves, into the new Western locales, the 3-D format provided an optical equivalent of manifest destiny, an invitation not only to enjoy the scene but also to take psychic possession of it. Describing the Victorian world view, Douglas R. Nickel, the associate curator of photography at SFMOMA who organized the show, writes, "To see something was to know it, and to know it was, in some sense, to control it."

Working as he did for so long among geologic immensities, Watkins knew how vain human notions of controlling nature really were. At times he could be a 19th century Alfred Hitchcock: he made walk-on appearances in some of his pictures, allowing the shadow of himself and his box camera to appear in the frame. As an artist's signature it was double edged, insisting that a living man had framed this scene but admitting all the same how temporary he was, just a shadow among the eternities of rock. But Watkins cast a long shadow after all.