Watkins was born in upstate New York in 1829, where he was a childhood friend of future railroad magnate Collis Huntington. He arrived in San Francisco with the gold rush, took up photography and was an instant success as a documentarian. Huntington made him his railroad’s photographer. But Watkins went bankrupt in the panic of 1873, and started over. “If this business don’t give us a living soon,” he wrote his wife in 1880, “we will go squat on some government land and raise spuds.” Watkins managed a comeback of sorts–taking real-estate photographs–but lost everything a second time, in the 1906 earthquake. Watkins died at 86, in a mental hospital. Some say he was an early Ansel Adams, but to us he was more like the first Pathfinder.
Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception.SFMoMA. Through Sept. 7.
