Shooting California : The State’s the Star in a Santa Barbara Photography Show

Among accidents of history, the relatively proximate births of photography (1839) and of the State of California (1850) may not be cataclysmic, but it is curious. It means you could probably tell a major chunk of the story of photography simply by drawing on the pictures made by photographers who lived or did considerable work in the state.

In essence, that is precisely what has been done in the engaging show and catalogue called “Watkins to Weston: 101 Years of California Photography, 1849-1950.” On view at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, where it opened Saturday, “Watkins to Weston” brings together the work of 65 photographers in three distinct, if not entirely separate, eras that will be familiar to anyone who has followed the general history of black-and-white camera work.

First are the “pioneers,” who explored the new medium while they simultaneously explored the new California territory in the wake of the 19th-Century gold rush. Next came the Pictorialists, intent on endowing mechanically made images with the status of art. Last came the Modernists, who simply accepted the camera as an artistic tool and sought to exploit its unique properties as a mode of purely modern vision.

Each of the show’s three sections has been organized by a different guest curator--Thomas Weston Fels, Therese Heyman and David Travis, respectively--while the whole was overseen by Santa Barbara Museum curator Karen Sinsheimer. The drawback to this procedure is a somewhat disjointed presentation, and a show and catalogue that have perhaps too many disparate things on their mind. Its virtue is the decided expertise brought to bear in each area. The show is characterized by a host of superlative images--some familiar, some not--and the catalogue offers numerous insights.

One of the chief early pleasures of the show is a remarkable 13-panel panorama of San Francisco, made in 1877 by Eadweard Muybridge and bound into a large book. Famous for his multiple photographic studies of figures in motion, examples of which are also on view, Muybridge here turned his camera to the task of making a sequential vista of the booming city. Pencil notations on the panorama, which is inscribed by the artist to Mrs. Leland Stanford, indicate that it was taken from the top of Mark Hopkins’ nearby home.

A sense of power and authority is conveyed by the dramatic sweep of the long, horizontal image, which encompasses all that the eye can see: mansions, row houses, excavation pits, churches, construction sites, shops, schooners in the bay, the far-off hills, the canopy of sky. (There is, of course, no Golden Gate bridge.) Like a Chinese scroll that records an imperial voyage, this panorama marks a kind of royal voyage of the eye, which sees from a privileged vantage point.

Common among the early landscape pictures is the representation of nature as a grandly idealized world of order and harmony. In Muybridge’s picture of the Yosemite Valley, a lone pine in the distance functions as a kind of visual spindle, around which a perfect cylinder of space has been carefully orchestrated from trees, cliffs and stream.

Muybridge has a certain prominence in this early section, but nowhere is the classical construction of landscape imagery more brilliantly executed than in Carleton Watkins’ photograph of a log dam built to create a shimmering lake in the wilderness. The power of nature and the authority of culture balance on point in this extraordinary image, which manages to make a monumental incursion into the raw frontier feel like the construction of the Parthenon. Surely it ranks among the greatest pictures made in the 19th Century.

The Pictorialist section of the exhibition is diverse, as befits its representation of a growing emphasis on individualization of expression. For many of these artists, including Edward Sherriff Curtis, Anne W. Brigman and the young Edward Weston, the use in their pictures of emphatic artifice or elements of abstract design was meant to counter dismissive claims that photography was merely a mechanical transcription of the world.

Pictorialism often made conscious appeals to visual traditions familiar from the history of painting and the graphic arts--a kind of “guilt by association” approach to confirming the medium’s artistic status. Among them, perhaps none is more disconcerting than that exploited by members of Southern California’s numerous Japanese-American camera clubs. In pictures from the mid-1920s, Shigemi Uyeda’s flat, decoratively patterned puddles of water floating on an oil ditch and Kentaro Nakamura’s diagonally curling wave seem remarkably abstract and crisply modern, especially when compared to the fuzzy, softly focused pictures of so many of their contemporaries. That Uyeda and Nakamura were drawing on traditions of Japanese painting, rather than of Western art, explains the odd and singular appeal of their exquisite work.

The show’s Modernist section contains many images that have come to be regarded as classics of California photography--pictures by Ansel Adams, Willard Van Dyke, John Guttman, Dorothea Lange, Man Ray, Margrethe Mather, Edmund Teske, Minor White, Max Yavno, Imogen Cunningham and more. While their pictures were made for a variety of purposes, ranging from the personal to the commercial, the show only makes a casual nod to the new advertising work that, in a different way, was so important to the period.

The inclusion of three Hollywood glamour photographs--Greta Garbo by Clarence Bull, Ann Sothern by George Hurrell, and Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth by Robert Coburn--is certainly appropriate. Yet, it makes one wonder about other absences. Why no examples of the voluminous, Chamber of Commerce-style photographs designed to sell an image of Los Angeles to the rest of America, much the way Hollywood glamour photographs sold movie stars?

Perhaps that’s too Postmodern a view for a show that stops in 1950. The first section (1849-1890) assembles photographs that see nature as raw material to be shaped and molded into an ideal vista. The second section (1890-1925) recognizes the process of idealization as art, and seeks to mimic with the tools of photography the techniques of painting--to recall its look, themes and subjects, and to probe psychological spaces. And, the third section (1925-1950) finally turns away from painting to idealize the camera itself, as a purely modern maker of dreams, aspirations and images.

The show’s organizers don’t say why they chose to stop in 1950, although historical excursions do typically tend to get muddier the closer they get to the present day. Still, a coda that took a skeptical look at camera-images from a contemporary vantage point might have been a nice ending for the show (which is admirable regardless). Imagine, for example, Muybridge’s remarkable panorama of San Francisco paired with Edward Ruscha’s great “Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” a fold-out panorama of Los Angeles made almost exactly a century later.

It’s unlikely Ruscha knew of Muybridge’s precedent. But, the thread of idealization that marks the first century of California camera work would have been definitively shown to have snapped. That’s another chunk of the story of photography that can be told through images made in California.

* At the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State St., (805) 936-4364, through May 31. Closed Mondays.