ERIN O’TOOLE: 

Carleton Watkins is probably the most important 19th-century photographer to come out of California.  

NARRATOR: 

Erin O’Toole, SFMOMA curator of photography: 

O’TOOLE: 

Carleton Watkins was interested in finding a way to convey the scale of the Western landscape to his audience, much of whom was on the East Coast. And so he had a cabinetmaker build him a giant camera that was capable of producing glass-plate negatives that were 18 by 22 inches. This is quite huge. Watkins called them mammoth-plate photographs.  

NARRATOR: 

Watkins didn’t enlarge any of his photographs. In fact, he printed them directly from the glass negative. No one before Watkins had documented the changing face of the West on such a scale, nor with such artistry. Watkins’s photographs helped shape the way we view the West today. Again, here’s Erin O’Toole.  

O’TOOLE: 

Carleton Watkins saw his mammoth-plate photographs as something more than just mere documents of what he had seen. He considered them to be more like paintings, and conceived of them as something to be hung on the wall, to be framed and to be considered like landscape paintings.  

And this is really important to the history of photography in California, because California was essentially the first place where photographs were looked at in this way; and that because perhaps California was sort of this new place with kind of frontier ideas, it didn’t seem so radical to consider photographs that were this mechanical art, to consider them as fine art like a painting.