A revolution occurred in American photography in the late 1850’s, after the invention and widespread use of wet-collodion plates. This technological advance – one of many to emerge from a scientific renaissance at mid-century – coincided with an intense public interest in nature and an enormous production of art and literature dealing with natural themes. Photographers joined the movement towards nature and made photographs of landscapes with more seriousness and success than ever before.

The government surveys of the western territories were organized immediately before and after the first transcontinental railroad penetrated the West in 1869, and photographers were present as important adjuncts to the exploration and construction parties. The photographs they made have long been seen as mere social and scientific documents but are now understood as images that broadened the boundaries of the photographic art.

Included in the exhibition are works by Carleton E. Watkins, Timothy O’Sullivan, Eadward Muybridge, William Rau, George N. Barnard, Andrew Joseph Russell, and William Henry Jackson among others.

All of the views are albumen prints made from glass plate negatives, some as large as eighteen by twenty-two inch “mammoth plates”. Early practitioners photographing in remote areas traveled with costly and cumbersome supplies, including a portable darkroom. The glass plates required on the site sensitizing, and the image had to be exposed and processed before the plate could dry. A practical dry plate process was developed in the mid 1870’s which made the process less difficult, but nonetheless an arduous procedure in comparison to our present day roll film and hand-held cameras.

This exhibition will run concurrently with “Carleton E. Watkins: Photographer of the American West” at the Oakland Museum from December 16 – February 19, 1984.

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Since 1950 Garry Winogrand has photographed the variety of life in public places, exploring the unique and intrinsic qualities of photographic description. During this time he has photographed many of the major personalities that have shaped our political and cultural climate. “Big Shots” is a compilation of these photographs, Winogrand’s pantheon of heros and villains. The group includes Winograndian portrayals of John F. Kennedy. Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol, Hugh Hefner, Norman Mailer, Diane Arbus and Lyndon Johnson, among several others.

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Made along the Mississippi River between 1980–82, William Eggleston’s recent “Louisiana Project” is being exhibited for the first time on the West Coast. Making straightforward and direct use of his 6×9 camera, with exceptional sensitivity to light and color, Eggleston has recorded the unremarked events and places of the everyday South: Missy’s SnoCone Stand, a discarded high school annual, bottles of hot sauce and a Bassett Hound sitting languidly on a porch. All of the photographs were made within a few miles of the Mississippi River, as Eggleston fulfilled the fantasy of every Southerner by making his own modern day Huck Finn journey.

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This show will run concurrently with Friedlander’s “Factory Valleys” exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

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