In Focus: Carleton E. Watkins

Among his well-known photographs of the American West, Carleton Watkins (1829-1916) is best remembered for his large-format outdoor photographs, especially those taken in Yosemite. This new volume of the In Focus series is devoted to some of his smaller and unusually shaped works, including stereographs, albumen prints, and cabinet and boudoir cards--most of which have never before been published.


The J. Paul Getty Museum's collection of Watkins's photographs consists of 1,464 pictures, making him the best-represented nineteenth-century photographer in the collection. Presented here are more than fifty of these photographs, along with commentary on each image by Peter Palmquist, an independent scholar of Northern California photography and author of numerous books and exhibition catalogues on the subject.

In Focus: Carleton Watkins also contains a chronological overview of the artist's life and an edited transcript of a colloquium on his career, with participants Palmquist; David Featherstone, independent editor and curator; Tom Fels, independent scholar; Weston Naef, curator emeritus of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum; David Robertson, professor of English at the University of California, Davis; and Amy Rule of the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson.