O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : Photos Put History in a Framework

With the death last week of landscape photographer Brett Weston (son of Edward Weston), the tiny group of pioneering and second-generation California modernist photographers who are still with us has shrunk even further.

In aesthetic terms, the Westons, Minor White, Imogen Cunningham and all the others are now as firmly a part of The Past as their 19th-Century forebears, Carleton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge.

So it seems particularly apt to see the whole cavalcade of early- and middle-period California photography on parade in “Watkins to Weston: 101 Years of California Photography, 1849-1950,” at the Laguna Art Museum (through March 28).

This exhibit--first shown last spring by the organizing institution, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art--includes the work of 64 photographers, famous and obscure. Their work spans the eras of rough-and-ready early settlement and Hollywood glamour, the eras of straightforward documentary views of lumber camps and introverted, sensual images of rocks and sand.

Some of the photographers spent only a brief time in California. But both visitors and natives were influenced by the striking qualities of the state’s natural features, the sensual climate and an atmosphere that encouraged experimentation.

Curated by three experts, the show is divided into parts: “Early California Landscapists”; “The Pictorialists” (turn-of-the-century photographers whose soft-focus, lyrical images mimicked paintings); and “The Modernists” (documentary photographers and members of the crisp-focus, f/64 group).

The early landscape photographers (1849 to 1890) were essentially reporters. Employed by government survey offices, or mining, lumber or railroad companies, they scouted an astoundingly varied and majestic terrain few people had seen.

As curator Thomas Weston Fels writes in the excellent catalogue, before such sights as the Yosemite Valley, the Sierra or the California coast became California’s familiar trademarks, “photographers played a key role in recognizing them as important motifs, defining them and bringing them to the attention of the public.”

Charles Leander Weed was the first to photograph Yosemite, in 1858. A ravishing view of Vernal Fall attributed to Weed portrays falling water as a granular curtain of whiteness blurring into ethereal mist.

Carleton Watkins was the acknowledged master of early landscape photography. The natural views he documented already had a distinct human imprint, with mills, pipelines, dams, railroads and settlements nestled among the rocks, hills and trees. Watkins’ work conveys a harmoniously matter-of-fact vision of human ingenuity finding a place within extraordinary natural settings.

Muybridge’s take on the California landscape displays a more subjective, romantic and inventive outlook.

His almost preternaturally crystalline “The Domes, Valley of Yosemite,” from 1872, looks like a studio mock-up of Awesome Nature, complete with sharply etched foreground rocks, a mirrorlike lake, a dark fringe of trees and a pale backdrop of distant peaks. Pages from Muybridge’s “Brandenberg Album” mysteriously combine sequential landscape views with a family-tree arrangement of portraits.

George Fiske’s small photos recreated the landscape in yet another way: as condensed, prettified views. One of his photos from the 1880s is patterned all over with azaleas--a close-up treatment of nature that would be refined a half-century later by modernist photographers.

Burgeoning cityscapes and other forms of architecture also were subjects of the early photographers, from the vast expanse of Muybridge’s 1877 “San Francisco Panorama” (comprising 13 separate prints) to Watkins’ photograph of the ornate, Belle Epoque-style dining room at Thurlow Lodge in Menlo Park.

At the other extreme, in a Watkins print from around 1880, a vast sea of emptiness surrounds Mission San Luis Rey in Oceanside, which looks as remote and lonely as the Pyramids.

In the Pictorialist era (1890-1925), photography turned from reportage to poetry, from crisp, big-scale views made on commission to intimate, shadowy compositions produced solely for the pleasure of the photographer. (This shift was previewed in such images as “Ore Tracks Near Santa Cruz, California,” from around 1880, in which Edward L. Woods transforms the mining and transportation infrastructure into a cozy view dappled with sun and shade.)

Kodak’s invention of the compact, push-button camera helped produce an enthusiastic crop of amateur photographers, many of whom were women. Their special concerns--as well as the popular subject-matter of Tonalist painting--influenced domestic themes (mothers and children, women at toilette) in some of this work.

Nudes frequently appear in the photographs of this era, their frankness assuaged by allegorical settings or dance-related themes. Nature now becomes a backdrop for gamboling nymphs, spectral maidens and--most unfortunately--Edward Curtis’ “noble savages” posing in breech cloths.

In her catalogue essay, curator Therese Heyman remarks that he “exercised some of the license which movies would assume as they recreated a dead past using imagined . . . props and settings.”

While some of the women photographers’ images of female nudes (such as Anne Brigman’s White Rock girl in “The Bubble”) now seem absurdly precious, the male photographers’ work sometimes resembled proto-Playboy cartoons. Roger Sturtevant’s “Freudian Composition”--a woman posing semi-nude beneath Johan Hagemeyer’s photograph of a tile factory with a very tall tower--and Arthur F. Kales’ absolutely dippy “Woman and Bottles” are examples of this genre.

But for sheer camp value, nothing tops William Mortensen’s outre compositions. They include “Inquisition,” a scene bristling with hooded monks, a nude woman tied to a huge wheel and a raffish fellow right out of a Breughel painting. (More of Mortensen’s off-kilter style is concurrently on view at the museum in “Visions and Ecologies: Photography in Laguna Beach, 1918-1993.”)

Favorite subjects of the Pictorialists also included soulful portraits of actresses (such as Arnold Genthe’s elegant image of Greta Garbo’s throat) and other women in the arts. Imogen Cunningham’s luminous 1923 shot of Margrethe Mather shows the photographer tipping her head back luxuriously, while the profile of her colleague Edward Weston is veiled in shadow.

Cunningham, Weston and Mather (to a much lesser extent) would all help to usher in the modernist era, characterized by the switch to “straight” photography, which was accomplished without recourse to the diffused lighting and lens manipulation beloved by the Pictorialists.

Mather broke away from her decoratively dreamy compositions to make sharp-focused semi-nude studies of a young man. Cunningham--a homebound mother--began taking crisp, close-up photos of plants in her garden. And Weston turned away from the moody geometry of “Bathing Pool” (grouped with the Pictorialist works) in favor of sensual images of seashells, vegetables and landscapes.

Most of his photographs included in this section of the exhibit--curated by David Travis--are now classics of the medium: the lustrous dark silhouette of “Pepper”; the headless, voluptuously fleshy female back in “Cristal, Glendale”; the richly textured views of Point Lobos.

In the early ‘30s, the new style was furthered by Group f/64, an informal association that included Weston and Cunningham as well as fledgling photographer Ansel Adams (whose earlier, soft-focus landscapes are grouped with the Pictorialists). Group members viewed photography as an art form with its own rules, rather than a stepchild of painting.

During the modernist period, the image of the California landscape underwent another sea-change. Fragmented, close-up views (such as Edward Weston’s Point Lobos series) and photographs that conflated sexual and natural imagery (the Westons’ sand-dune photographs, Minor White’s graphic “Fourth Sequence” abstractions of rocks) revealed a new merger of aesthetic vision, human activity and visual fact.

The experimental work of this era included the Dada playfulness of the artist Man Ray, who sojourned in California during the ‘40s. A pal of Henry Miller, Man Ray photographed a wittily face-painted nude muse posing behind the writer.

Another side of photography surfaced during the Depression years, when thousands of migrant workers left the Dust Bowl for the promised land of California, only to encounter dire and oppressive conditions.

Sponsored by the Farm Security Administration, former portrait photographer Dorothea Lange sought out such haunting images as “Mexican Child, Imperial Valley, California,” in which a dazed little girl with a deformed leg and nasty welts on her skin appears to be chained to the dirt floor of her house.

Other photographers of the ‘30s and ‘40s earned their pay from commercial sources. Max Yavno--whose talent for squeezing a multitude of crisp details into a single shot reached its apogee in the summertime crowd scene of “Muscle Beach”--compiled images of San Francisco and Los Angeles into books.

John Gutmann--who mastered a deceptively casual, random-seeming compositional style--worked for journalistic photo agencies. George Hurrell and others employed by the Hollywood studios shot movie stars enhanced by banks of flattering lights.

The exhibit stops in 1950, for no apparent reason other than the desire to round out the final decade of the first century of California photography. Too bad this rich selection of work isn’t augmented by a fourth section showing the ways contemporary California photographers are recycling and revising the work of their predecessors--and demonstrating a self-conscious artiness the Pictorialists may well have envied.

“Watkins to Weston: 101 Years of California Photography, 1849-1950” remains through March 28 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. Hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday. $3 (general), $1.50 (senior citizens and students) and free for children under 12. (714) 494-6531.