Natural Wonder

Carleton Watkins was one of those gifted but hapless figures whose life is a cautionary tale about the perils of becoming an artist. Eighty-three years after his death, and more than three decades after scholars hoisted his reputation back from the grave, he ranks among the greatest 19th century American photographers. Looking now at his pictures of Yosemite Valley or the Willamette River in Washington, it's plain how they helped create the 19th century notion of the Western landscape, so stately and sizable, as a geologic preamble to the American future, a stone tablet engraved by God. And given the high luster and detail of his prints, it's no surprise that at the height of Watkins' career his photographs won ribbons in Paris and his San Francisco studio was a tourist destination in itself.

All the same, Watkins was unsuited to the roughhouse of 19th century capitalism. Born in 1829 in rural Oneonta, N.Y., he went to California in the early 1850s in the wake of the gold rush and drifted into work in a photographer's studio. The first white explorers saw Yosemite at around the same time. Watkins, who made the earliest of several trips there in 1861, was among the first photographers to record the place in pictures that quickly secured his reputation but not his fortune. Though he would work steadily for years, mostly along the Pacific Coast, he was a feeble businessman at the best of times, and was bankrupted by the transcontinental panic of 1873. At one desperate point he was reduced to living with his family in an abandoned boxcar. Then came the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, which destroyed his studio and all the glass negatives he still possessed. He died 10 years later in a hospital for the insane.

For a long time Watkins has been one of the art world's recovered memories, though rarely recovered so handsomely as he is in "Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception," more than 150 vintage prints that make up the beautifully executed show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through Sept. 7. (In October it moves to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, then to the National Gallery of Art in Washington.) Watkins may never have thought of himself as an artist, but like Eugene Atget, the tireless chronicler of Paris neighborhoods, he came so deeply to terms with his locale that he arrived at a vision.

Before it was anything else, Watkins' work in Yosemite was a feat of mountaineering. To make pictures commensurate with the scale of the giant valley, he arranged to have an oversize wooden camera built that could hold 22-in. by 18-in. glass negatives. The plates were both heavy and fragile. Watkins and his mule teams hauled dozens of them, plus a literal ton of provisions and darkroom equipment, across the difficult routes around Half Dome and El Capitan.