Review by Choice Review
Students of early Pacific Coast photography will find this handsomely published volume of some of New York native Carleton Watkins's work engaging. Watkins's career is well-known. This volume acknowledges both the success he enjoyed as a landscape photographer and the difficulties he experienced in managing his commercial and financial endeavors. Though these difficulties were a burden he seldom escaped, this volume bears testament to his skills as a photographer and chronicler of the changing landscape of the Far West. This is the catalogue for a 2014 exhibition at Stanford University's Cantor Arts Center of three bound volumes of Watkins's mammoth photographs of 1861-76, held by Stanford University Libraries: Photographs of the Pacific Coast, Photographs of the Yosemite Valley, and Photographs of the Columbia River and Oregon. This volume presents the publication for the first time of all 156 strikingly beautiful, aesthetically composed, and historically significant images. The images reveal the nuances of nature along the Pacific Coast and the frequent presence of the emerging intrusion of industrial civilization. Fourteen essays complement the photographs and provide context for, perspective on, and interpretation of the albums and their photographs. --Phillip D. Thomas, Wichita State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review