Harry N Abrams Inc Art Of Perception — Carleton Watkins

Carleton Watkins (1829-1916) is considered by many to be the greatest American photographer of the nineteenth century. This companion volume to a major traveling exhibition is the most beautiful book on Carleton Watkin's work ever published. Produced using state-of-the-art tritone printing, it showcases over 100 of the photographer's best images, including several of Watkins's extraordinary multipart panoramic works. From breathtaking pictures of Yosemite, the Pacific Coast and the scenery along the Columbia River to photographs of the vast mining tracts of the Sierra Nevada and the towns springing up along the recently built Central and Southern Pacific railroads, these images provide an unparalleled visual record of the West.

The accompanying introduction by Maria Morris Hambourg, curator in charge of the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and essay by Douglas R. Nickel, Associate Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, not only place Watkins's work in its photo-historical perspective, but also in context with his artistic contemporaries: Edgar Degas and Paul Cezanne.

In his essay, Nickel states, ?[Watkins's] photographs defeat interpretations of the narrative or symbolic sort because they aspired to be something altogether different from traditional art: they aspired to be perceptual, to engage the sensibilities of their beholders in an exercise of ocular gratification and visual intelligence.?