Composite from collected images tagged with “half dome” on Flickr.

Fire Island (twice), 2010

One of my better mistakes.

Ice cone, Montmorency Falls, QC, 1876
Alexander Henderson, Salted Print

More information about this image at the Musée McCord

Fire Island, 2009
click image for larger view

I spent a lot of time on this beach over the winter. It wasn’t until June that I discovered that it was clothing optional!

There’s something about walking along the highway that has always appealed to me. In this case, the Shore Parkway actually has a very nice bike path that goes through some beautiful scenery. Every once in a while, I’ll come across a path that leads deep into the undergrowth. Sometimes it leads into a field of poison ivy and briars, and sometimes it’s just a dead end. Every once in a while, though, one will open up into one of these secret places and it feels like a wonderland.

Have you ever had the experience of learning a new word, only to hear it everywhere for a little while? It’s possible that I just wasn’t paying attention before, but it seems like I have been hearing Carleton Watkins’ name everywhere these days. I first noticed his photographs at the Framing a Century exhibition at the Met last fall. I had seen a few of his photographs in books, but seeing them in person really caught my attention. His photographs seemed to be vibrating at a different frequency than the other images in the show.

I found a short overview of Watkins’ life and work in the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, but the jpegs are unsatisfactory in telling his story. Smithsonian Magazine recently published a brief but good article about Watkins, which led me to search of the Library of Congress image archive. All of this research simply fed my desire to see more.

The Cliff House and Environs, Stereographic View, By Carleton Watkins

Portage Railroad at the Dalles Looking West, by Carleton Watkins

Geyser Canyon, California, by Carleton Watkins

Devil Canyon, California, by Carleton Watkins

Many of Watkins’ most impressive photographs were taken with a custom 18×22 inch camera on huge wet plate collodion glass negatives. Watkins traveled extensively along the West Coast, taking some of the first photographs of the Yosemite Valley along the way. The logistics of working with such a camera in those formidable conditions is mind-boggling today. Unfortunately, thousands of his negatives were broken in the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, which makes his surviving prints are all the more scarce and important.

His original prints were produced in albumen and silver, and as I said before, the jpegs and reproductions I had seen in books did not do them justice. I set out to find some high-quality reproductions and came across Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception at the local library. The book was produced to accompany a major exhibition of Watkins’ work in 1999. I cannot recommend this book highly enough: not only is the selection of photographs comprehensive and extremely well printed, but Douglas R. Nickel’s accompanying essay is an insightful and enjoyable read into Watkins’ place in the history of art and photography.

Some of my favorite pieces in The Art of Perception are the panoramic views. These triptychs are reproduced as gatefolds, and the result is quite striking. I have considered buying a second copy of the book just so I can cut them out and frame them, but that feels somehow sacrilegious to me. The book is out of print, but there are still a few used copies to be found.

Since discovering Watkins’ work I have also become interested in the writings of John Muir, who used Watkins’ photos to illustrate his argument for preserving the Yosemite Valley, ultimately resulting in the legislation that created our National Park system. I also recently came across a short book on the subject by Frederick Law Olmstead, and bought it for a dollar. Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove: A Preliminary Report, 1865 was written around the time Watkins was working in Yosemite and was suppressed by the California legislature for being too controversial, not to be rediscovered until the 1950s. It is now clear that the report was groundbreaking and it is unfortunate that it took so long to come to light. Imagine my surprise when I looked the book up on Amazon after getting home and found that it is actually quite rare and usually sells for $60 or more!

One of my favorite Watkins triptychs is part of the current Into the Sunset exhibition at MoMA. Seeing these three photographs together in person completely blew me away, and was worth the price of admission alone.

View from the Sentinel Dome, Yosemite, by Carleton Watkins

The show is overwhelming and exhilarating, with some excellent landscape work by Stephen Shore, Richard Misrach, Robert Adams, and Joel Sternfeld, among many others. The photographs are arranged to play off of each other, and are enhanced by the juxtapositions of old and new. But no matter how many times I circled the gallery, I kept coming back to that Watkins triptych. It is truly inspiring work.

I’ve photographed in this park several times over the last couple of years, but this is the first time I’ve used color film. I paid for these photos with a lot of bruises and a slightly battered camera, but I’m happy with the results.

The rest of this series can be found here.

I had a productive day in Long Island this Saturday. This area is in a park near Oyster Bay, on the North Shore of the island. The geography and flroa are very different from the South Shore, where I have been spending most of my time lately. Based on this set, I think I may be inspired to try large format again. I’ve been using a Hasselblad for the last year or so, and have been very happy with the usability of the camera and quality of the images. But with photos like these, the more depth of field, and the more detail, the better.

The last few times I took out a large format camera were not very productive. It might be the more complicated set up, or maybe I just don’t see images as well on the ground glass (upside down, no less!), but there were problems with each and every photo I took the last time I used it. But I am never one to give up easily, and I know this series of photos will benefit greatly from the enhanced resolution, depth of field, and the overall clarity of the images I know large format is capable of providing.

So much for not posting new work for a little while! These photos make me happy and I wanted to get them out into the world. Maybe I’ve been over-thinking it, and in the end, that’s all there is to it?

This weekend I am planning another trip to Fire Island, which will include about 15 miles of walking. My hopes for the day are to see some deer and not to freeze to death. If I happen to take any pictures that I’m happy about, all the better.

Brooklyn, New York

Queens, New York

Fire Island, New York

Queens, New York