Tag Archives: Bay Area

Carleton Watkins. Sugar Loaf Islands and Seal Rocks, Farallons, 1868–69.

Carleton Watkins: The Stanford Albums

Note: This post was originally published on NJWV. It may also be of interest to read @kukkurovaca’s and @kalli’s views on Watkins and albumen prints from one125.

Carleton Watkins. The Wreck of the Viscata, 1868.
The Wreck of the Viscata, 1868
Carleton Watkins. Sugar Loaf Islands and Seal Rocks, Farallons, 1868–69.
Sugar Loaf Islands and Seal Rocks, Farallons, 1868–69
Carleton Watkins. Alcatraz from North Point, 1862–1863.
Alcatraz from North Point, 1862–1863
Carleton Watkins. Magenta Flume Nevada Co. Cal., c. 1871.
Carleton Watkins. Magenta Flume Nevada Co. Cal., c. 1871
Carleton Watkins. The Yosemite Valley from the "Best General View" 1866.
The Yosemite Valley from the “Best General View” 1866.
Carleton Watkins. Pohono, the Bridal Veil, Yosemite 900 ft., 1865–1866.
Pohono, the Bridal Veil, Yosemite 900 ft., 1865–1866
Carleton Watkins. Mt. Hood and the Dalles, Columbia River, 1867.
Mt. Hood and the Dalles, Columbia River, 1867
Carleton Watkins. Cape Horn, Columbia River, 1867.
Cape Horn, Columbia River, 1867
Carleton Watkins. Cape Horn near Celilo, 1867.
Cape Horn near Celilo, 1867

I’ve been gradually moving toward an appreciation of the older landscape photographers. This doesn’t mean I suddenly dislike the contrasty, technically-perfect Ansel Adams school of landscape photography.* But I’m finding myself liking photography which contains elements of embracing the inherent limitations of the medium—while pushing as hard against them as possible—rather than photography which tends to treat those limitations as flaws.

*Quite the opposite. Heck I still use a red-filter way too often when shooting black and white film.

Also, now that I’m living on the East Coast, I’ve gotten a lot more possessive about the West and find that media, of all sorts, has a tendency to trigger stronger feelings of home than it used to. Watkins, and much of the early landscape photography in general, is all about the American West and its myths. It’s what I grew up with and absorbed as part of my visual culture.

Which is why Carleton Watkins at Stanford was the exhibition I was most looking forward to seeing in California this summer. It did not disappoint.

The photos themselves are great. Albumen prints from mammoth plates show a lot of detail but in a hazy low-contrast way that’s quite different than what we’re used to seeing from “good” photography. In particular, there’s a lack of distance detail (blue-sensitive emulsions are sensitive to atmospheric haze) as well as often an uncertain black point (more like the D-max isn’t as dark as a modern D-max would be).

Water also behaves a lot differently between the long exposures and lack of highlight detail. Waves get flattened into haze and waterfalls turn into lightsources. It feels different than modern long-exposure water shots since Watkins’s photos don’t actually feel like long-exposures to me.

There’s something very evocative about all this. I find myself mentally adjusting the contrast and filling in details as I look over the photos. These details aren’t necessary to the images themselves but they engage my mind as I look them over. As “realistic” as the images are, they’re also much closer to paintings than modern photography in terms of how they make me imagine the scene. I’m not looking for small specific details in the frame (or noting those details the photographer has called out for me), I’m getting a sense of the place and letting my mind do the rest of the interpretation.

The technical limitations also mean that these photos often rely on shapes and forms and large-scale compositional elements which don’t require a lot of fine detail—something that will make all photographs better but is even more critical here. That said, there is a lot of fine detail present as well. For example, you can see the birds and the seals roosting on the Farallon Islands just as clearly as you can make out the forms of the rocks.

I also like the older landscape photography because of how its message differs from landscape photography today. Modern landscape photography is often environmental-minded, relying on the glory of unspoiled nature to remind the viewer that nature needs to be preserved. 150 years ago, the message was almost the opposite. The glory of unspoiled nature was all potential and something we could, and should, tame.

I don’t prefer the older message, I just like seeing the world when it had a different mindset. And I find that seeing that mindset makes a better case for why things should be different today. It’s been a century and a half. We should know better now.

One of the wonderful things about Watkins when compared to O’Sullivan and Russell is how his photos can work with both messages.

Much of Watkins’s work are industrial commissions showing development in San Francisco or mining operations in the Sierras. It’s very clear that he’s a working photographer tasked with making functional documentary images.

At the same time, his Yosemite photos directly resulted in Congress granting Yosemite to California in 1864, “upon the express conditions that the premises shall be held for public use, resort, and recreation.” Not a National Park. Yet. But not for development either.*

*There’s a great note in the wall text about how in the 1860s, the only two photographic series being viewed in the US were Watkins’s photos of the Pacific and Brady’s (and Gardner’s) photos of the Civil War. The text suggests how different these series must have seemed to the public. I also can’t wrap my head around there being only two photographic series in public consciousness for those years. Definitely not the world we live in today.

In both his commissioned work and in his Yosemite photos, you can see the conflicts between settlement and industry versus nature. Many of his industry photos feel like the struggle is still ongoing rather than complete—cities are still being built, nature still dwarfs the structures. Even where massive amounts of earth have been moved, the environmental consequences should already have been somewhat common knowledge in California.*

*Malakoff Diggins and the Marysville flooding.

Similarly, many of his unspoiled Yosemite views feature development. A cabin or lodge here. A bridge there. Trees with all of their lower limbs harvested. Nature is glorious but our footprints are all over it still.

The Columbia River views are even better at making this point. Watkins documents what’s ostensibly a journey along a railroad along the river. The landscape here however dwarfs the technology and rather than documenting how a railroad is imposed on a landscape, the railroad here is often just taking what the landscape will let it take as it squeezes between the river and the cliffs.

The cliffs are huge. The river contains un-dammed rapids. This is spectacular country where the accomplishment is just getting there and reaching the end of the Oregon Trail.

It’s also impossible not to look at these historically. Not only is this San Francisco before the earthquake, it’s San Francisco while it was being built. A very different city with basically nothing recognizable to me, including the coastline. I can count 35 stars on the US flag.* Most-weird is looking at views of the California coast before Eucalyptus took over. This is home before it became home.

*Meaning it must have been taken in the one-year window between West Virginia’s admission in 1863 and Nevada’s in 1864. Assuming that people replaced old flags as soon as new states were admitted.

Watkins’s Yosemite photos also include the Indian names for everything. While we stile use many of those names, a lot has been renamed since. It’s nice to be reminded about whose land we’re on and how we’ve tended to erase or forget the origins of their names.

The exhibition also plays up the historic angle through a series of interactive multimedia displays featuring maps and rephotography so visitors can see what things look like today, where the photos were taken, or what changes have been made to the sites between then and now.

In addition to the multimedia displays, there’s actually a lot of other technical information beyond the photos. The exhibit talks about collodoin and wet-plate photography; albumen and contact printing; and even a bit at how a view camera works in terms of composing the scene. It’s nice to see the awareness that museumgoers probably have a much different concept about cameras and photography and that the difference in technology is hugely important to understanding a lot of what we’re looking at.

The Cantor even goes so far as to include examples of prints from Watkins’s negatives made by an inferior printer as well as calling out when Watkins switched from a normal to a wide angle lens.*

*According to the wall text, his 1861 Yosemite photos led to Congress’s Yosemite Land Grant in 1864 which led to the 1865 California Geologic survey of Yosemite for which Watkins acquired a wide angle lens.

It’s a great show. That it consists of photos that are housed at Stanford is even better. The Bay Area, still, does a lousy job of marketing its art holdings as being hugely important to the art world in general. So for a local institution to take its locally-relevant art holdings and put together a show like this is the icing on the cake.

Arthur Tress, Untitled (Coit Tower), 1964

Arthur Tress, San Francisco

In hindsight, we know that Arthur is a talented artist. But in 1964, he was a young man fresh out of school.

James A. Ganz

Arthur Tress, Untitled (Ocean Beach), 1964
Untitled (Ocean Beach), 1964
Arthur Tress, Untitled (City Hall), 1964
Untitled (City Hall), 1964
Arthur Tress, Untitled (Coit Tower), 1964
Untitled (Coit Tower), 1964

Still upset I missed this at the DeYoung. It was nice to be reminded of these when they surfaced again on Lens Blog. When I first saw the information on the show, it felt like a local-interest show. Reading it in the Times, the extra framing of it as sorta-juvenalia of a young artist finding his voice makes it a more interesting presentation to me.

It’s also of course interesting to see it framed as capturing weird San Francisco before it goes extinct but that’s a post for another blog.

Chris Benton. Saltscapes. Levee.

Cris Benton: Saltscapes

What began as a photographic romp through a visually compelling landscape slowly shifted toward documenting the landscape’s history and deciphering traces of it evident in my aerial photographs. My aerial images often presented puzzling artifacts and these fueled visits to libraries, map rooms, and local experts. Then it was back to the field for more photographs. After photographing for several years, I came to appreciate that the landscape was still in transition, and rapidly at that, as the salt pond restoration project gained stride. This realization has lent a sense of urgency to the project.

Cris Benton

Cris Benton. Saltscapes. Oliver salt ruins.
Oliver salt ruins.
Cris Benton. Saltscapes. Anchorage near the East end of the Dumbarton Bridge.
Anchorage near the East end of the Dumbarton Bridge.
Cris Benton. Saltscapes. Bayfront Park.
Bayfront Park.
Cris Benton. Saltscapes. Cargill crystallizers.
Cargill crystallizers.
Cris Benton. Saltscapes. Levee.
Levee.
Cris Benton. Saltscapes. Oliver salt ruins.
Oliver salt ruins.

Anyone who’s looked out their airplane window while flying into San Francisco will have noticed the patterns of colored ponds all along the bay. I’ve seen people ask what they are on twitter. It seems most people aren’t aware of the San Francisco salt industry.

Which is too bad since it’s an interesting industry and a vitally important thing to be aware of in terms of the Bay Area’s current development. What to do with the salt ponds—restore or redevelop—given the local housing crunch and impending rising sea levels means this real estate is a big deal.

In any case, for better or for worse, a lot of the ponds are on their way out and it’s nice that people like Cris Benton are documenting the transition. The ponds are indeed beautiful in an abstract strange-nature way.* But they’re also remnants of the built environment which are being replaced by new industry. Not exactly ruins—though there are ruins in them—but decay and renewal. I kind of want to buy the book.

*One of my first jobs involved going out into the ponds and testing the water quality.

Note: The Berkeleyside interview is also good read for anyone interested in kite aerial photography. I especially like the drone vs. kite discussion as it reminds me of digital vs. film discussions.

Alec Soth. Menlo Park, CA. 2013. Facebook main campus.

LBM Dispatch 4: Three Valleys

Note: This was originally posted on NJWV and references SFMOMA On the Go’s Project Los Altos which featured just the Silicon Valley photos. I saw that show last December and ordered LBM Dispatch 4 as both a catalog of my visit and for the additional context of Three Valleys instead of just Silicon Valley.

Alec Soth. Menlo Park, CA. 2013. Facebook main campus.
Menlo Park, Facebook main campus.
Alec Soth. Silicon Valley, CA. 2013.
Silicon Valley.
Alec Soth. San Joaquin Valley, CA. 2013. Woodville Farm Labor Camp.
San Joaquin Valley. Woodville Farm Labor Camp.
Alec Soth. Ione, CA. 2013. Rancho Secho Nuclear Plant.
Ione. Rancho Secho Nuclear Plant.
Alec Soth. Death Valley, CA. 2013
Death Valley.
Alec Soth. Death Valley, CA. 2013
Death Valley.

After seeing Alec Soth’s photos of Silicon Valley, I wanted to see them in his Three Valleys series to see how my perception of them changed. My reaction to the Silicon Valley photos was very personal and while I appreciated what Soth was doing, I felt that it was an inadequate portrait of my home. I like them immensely more in their Three Valleys context.

My main issue with the Silicon Valley photos involved the lack of area history in the photos.

I found myself thinking a lot about who else should have been chosen. The lack of Intel or Cisco for example are pretty striking considering what all the tech companies actually run on. I also thought about how the set would have looked different if it had been shot in 2000. Or 1990. Or 1980. Silicon Valley has been around a long time now but people only think of the current version as a new thing.

I’ve spent the last few weeks driving past the construction site for the gleaming new Apple campus, the first phase of which is to tear down what used to be the main HP campus. The constant churning of industrial park construction/destruction as industries come and go is completely absent from the photos. As is the similar churning of strip malls and suburban housing.

Alec Soth’s Silicon Valley

This is no longer an issue when the San Joaquin Valley and Death Valley photos are included. What was a portrait of Silicon Valley has become more about California and its mythos as the promised land and how closely together success & failure and new & old and nature & technology live together. Instead of being about the details of one industry, it’s become about the ways different industries come and go and how people are left behind when the industry moves on.

As someone who visits the Central Valley regularly from the Bay Area, I’m very familiar with the time-warp nature of traveling from Silicon Valley to the San Joaquin Valley. Everything is different. Life moves at a different pace. Driving huge distances becomes normal. Technology even seems somewhat marooned in the past and any cutting edge technology is like magic.*

*For the first few years when Priuses were backordered in the Bay Area, you could drive them off the lots in Fresno.

Comparing the two valleys really shows the two sides of the California dream and does a better job at suggesting the boom/bust nature of things than anything I’d hope to see in just the Silicon Valley series. Soth’s photos also consistently show how isolating the California myth is. The myth is to go out and strike it rich on your own. On. Your. Own. There’s no sense of community in any of the photos. Instead Soth shows people working on individual projects or isolated by their technology or soldiering on as the last of their kind. Kids are left to their own devices—albeit safely tethered. For such a supposedly free place we’ve erected a lot of walls for ourselves.

The people all feel familiar to me too. I know them. I’ve been them. I’ve talked to them. I’ve listened to them. They’re portraits of both people and archetypes

Bringing Death Valley into the mix adds another aspect of the California experience—namely how close the state is to getting wiped out by nature. Throughout the Silicon and San Joaquin sequences, Soth has included photos of nature butting up with industry. In the Bay Area we love that nature—whether the foothills or the bay— are right there. At the same time, both threaten to wipe us out. Faultlines go through the foothills on both sides of the bay. Global warming meanwhile promises higher sea levels in the future. In the Central Valley, it’s more about resource usage and how everything dies without water.

Nature is always there, lurking, as something to be respected. Especially with regard to water availability. Everything in California relies on water at some level. Death Valley is the ultimate warning of what we risk becoming, or returning to, should we screw up our resource management.

Death Valley also serves as an example of land which we haven’t managed to tame despite all out technological advances. For all our glittering promise and talk about being able to do anything, there are parts of the state which are inhospitable and lack mobile phone coverage and won’t be getting any of that any time soon.

Zackary Canepari. Sydewayz

Zackary Canepari. Sydewayz.

Deep in East Oakland they’d meet in empty parking lots and spin circles until the police came. The Sideshow, they called it. Elaborate and boisterous stunt driving. Back then it was about the cars more than the skill of the drivers but the goal was still the same. It was about making a statement. A loud and smokey announcement to the status quo. And the message was simple: ‘All eyes on me!’

Zackary Canepari

Zackary Canepari. Sydewayz
Zackary Canepari. Sydewayz.

I’m always sort of a sucker for photography crossed with car culture. I think it’s because both are sort of gearhead hobbies. And the way that one is “look at me” and the other is “I like to watch” results in a good mix.

Also, this is in kukkurovaca’s back yard and makes me (as a South Bay kid) sort of homesick for California.