Carleton Watkins and the Element of Time

Date: Sunday, January 25, 2009
Time: 3:00 p.m
Location: Getty Center, Harold M. Williams Auditorium
Admission: Free; reservations required. Call (310) 440-7300 or use the "Make Reservation" button below.



Weston Naef, senior curator of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum, traces how Carleton Watkins, subject of the current exhibition Dialogue among Giants: Carleton Watkins and the Rise of Photography in California, made time itself an element of content in his photographs. Focusing on select photographs, Naef illuminates how Watkins influenced Eadweard Muybridge by laying the groundwork for Muybridge's motion studies through his own multiple views of one subject or location.

About Dialogue among Giants
The exhibition Dialogue among Giants: Carleton Watkins and the Rise of Photography in California (on view through March 1, 2009, at the Getty Center) presents the photographs of Carleton Watkins (American, 1829–1916) in the context of the birth and evolution of photography in California. The exhibition considers the social, political, economic, and artistic developments in California between the time of statehood in 1850 and the mid-1880s. It includes approximately 150 works, from daguerreotypes by unknown makers to mammoth-plate photographs by Watkins and his contemporaries.

About Weston Naef
One of the foremost historians of photography, Weston Naef is the founding curator of the J. Paul Getty Museum's Department of Photographs, one of the greatest such collections in the world. He has published on American 19th-century landscape photography and on Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and André Kertész, among other photographers. His most recent book is Carleton Watkins in Yosemite. Naef is currently working on a major project to catalogue the mammoth-plate photographs of Carleton Watkins.

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