Carleton Watkins :: Yosemite Photographs

Did You Know :: Carleton Watkins’ Yosemite Photographs

Carleton Watkins (1829–1916) had virtually no practical photography experience during the Civil War, as did many of his contemporaries. In 1851, when he was twenty-one, Watkins left Oneonta, New York, for California, following the example of Collis P. Huntington, another Oneonta native who had moved to California to make his fortune. After a stint in Huntington's store in Sacramento, Watkins moved to San Francisco, where he chanced into an apprenticeship with the daguerreotypist Robert Vance. By 1858, Watkins had established an independent practice, photographing mining operations and land claims for financiers who were building their careers in the lap of the new state.

Watkins and his contemporaries Charles Leander Weed and Eadweard Muybridge labored under difficult conditions to produce enormous photographs of Yosemite that pushed the technological limits of the medium and mirrored the scale of the place beginning in the 1860s and continuing into the 1890s.

In 1861 Carleton Watkins made history when he hauled a huge box camera—custom-designed around the glass-plate negatives needed for large prints—into Yosemite. Once a shot was framed, the plate was coated with a light-sensitive emulsion, then exposed and developed on-site in a dark tent. It was a grueling process, in which a drop of sweat or a stray insect could ruin the image and hours of work. Watkins’s 1861 photographs were among the first in the world to be considered landscape art. Three years later, Weed took his own mammoth plate camera to Yosemite, but Watkins’s main competitor was Eadweard Muybridge. Often composed like landscape paintings, Muybridge’s Yosemite photographs differed stylistically from Watkins’s classically structured works. Muybridge also signed his negatives to avoid the piracy that plagued Watkins, whose prints were reissued without credit to the photographer. Together, these three men transformed photography as an art form and inspired generations of artists. Their legacy persists in Yosemite, which remains among the most photographed landscapes in the world.

In 1861, Watkins traveled with one of his patrons, Trenor Park, entrepreneur of the Mariposa gold mine, on a family excursion to Yosemite. Unknown to white settlers until 1849, the valley was twenty hours by stage and mule from San Francisco. But word spread fast at the Mariposa mine, and by 1858 there were land claims, a better road, and tourists enough to support a hotel. In 1859, Charles Leander Weed photographed the valley, and by 1861 Easterners had come to know of the awe-inspiring site from articles in the Boston Evening Transcript, written by the Unitarian minister Thomas Starr King.

The 30 mammoth-plate (18x22 inches) and 100 stereo views that Watkins took in Yosemite in 1861 were among the first photographs of the valley sent back east. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Ralph Waldo Emerson received copies through Starr King, and in 1862 the photographs excited further interest when they were exhibited at Goupil's New York gallery. It was partly on their evidence that President Lincoln signed a bill in 1864 declaring the valley inviolate and leading the way to the National Parks system.

Watkins combined a mastery of the difficult wet-plate negative process with a rigorous sense of pictorial structure. For large-format landscape work such as he produced in Yosemite, the physical demands of this process were great. Since there was as yet no practical means of enlarging, Watkins’ glass negatives had to be as large as he wished the prints to be, and his camera large enough to accommodate them. Furthermore, the glass negatives had to be coated, exposed, and developed while the collodion remained tacky, requiring the photographer to transport a traveling darkroom as he explored the rugged terrain of the American West.

Relevant Vocabulary

Mammoth Plate an oversize glass plate used to make a negative image in nineteenth-century photography

Albumen Print a photographic print made on paper coated with albumen (egg white)

Ambrotype a mid-nineteenth-century photographic type in which a positive image was recorded on collodion wet plate.

Daguerreotype an early photographic type in which an image is recorded on highly polished piece of metal coated with a light sensitive emulsion. Daguerreotypes were one-of-a-kind images that could not be reproduced.

Wet Collodion a nineteenth-century photographic type in which a piece of plate glass was coated with a silver halide emulsion and placed in a camera while still wet. A latent image was recorded, and then the wet plate was developed, fixed, and varnished to create a glass negative for production of stereograph and mammoth plate photographs.

Silver Gelatin Print the most common form of twentieth-century black-and-white photographic print, in which a piece of paper is coated with a light-sensitive silver gelatin emulsion

Stereograph a popular nineteenth-century photograph in which two small, side-by-side images made using a special twin lens camera create the illusion of a three dimensional scene.

Sublime a historical, philosophical, literary, and art idea that contributed to Romanticism the notion of a greatness with which nothing else can be compared and which is beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation. This greatness is often used when referring to nature and its vastness.

Romanticism an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated around the middle of the 18th century in Western Europe, during the Industrial Revolution. It was partly a revolt against aristocratic, social, and political norms of the Enlightenment period and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature in art and literature.

Framework

Explain to guests that the first Euro-Americans to see the Yosemite region were probably part of the Walker party in 1833, but the first official entrants were part of the Mariposa Battalion, who, in 1851, were sent to forcibly remove the Indian inhabitants of Yosemite after the discovery of gold on John C. Frémont’s ranch in the Mariposa/Bear Valley area of the Sierra Nevada foothills. Shortly thereafter, in 1855, publisher James Mason Hutchings entered Yosemite with a party of men, including Thomas A. Ayres, who created the first drawing of Yosemite Falls ever made.

Explain that the three most significant of Yosemite’s nineteenth-century photographers—Charles Leander Weed, Carleton E. Watkins, and Eadweard J. Muybridge—all created photographs of Yosemite from glass negatives, using the wet plate collodion process, and printing them on paper using the albumen process. All three men were famed for their mammoth plates, unusually large, plate glass negatives designed to capture the large sweeping vistas of Yosemite (and other western sites). However, all three men also created numerous stereographs or stereoviews. These much smaller, side-by-side images were popular for armchair travelers after their invention in the 1840s, and they were comparatively inexpensive, which made them an increasingly popular tourist souvenir commemorating a visit to a wondrous place like Yosemite.

Explain that publisher and entrepreneur James Mason Hutchings made another visit to Yosemite in June, 1859, this time with photographer Charles Weed, rather than a painter or drawer, as he had in 1855 with Thomas Ayres. This was in part because Ayres’ drawings and lithographs, which had been published in Hutchings’ California Magazine in 1855, were deemed by readers to be fanciful—and Hutchings needed to prove that Yosemite Falls were indeed as dramatic as they had been earlier represented.

Explain that Weed took the first photograph of Yosemite in 1859, an imperial-sized (10x14-inch) salt print of Yosemite Falls. During this first visit, he made twenty imperial prints, and forty stereograph views of Yosemite, beginning what would become Later, in 1863/1864, Weed returned with a camera capable of holding 17x22-inch mammoth plates. Gold-toned albumen prints, a new technology that hadn’t been available in 1859, were made of these later negatives, which were richer and clearer than the earlier imperial salt prints.

Explain that all of Watkins’ photographs included in the exhibition are mammoth plate albumen prints from 1861-1865. He made his first visit to Yosemite in 1861, two years after Weed’s first visit, and three years before Weed’s second visit. This enabled him to make a name for himself as a Yosemite photographer, as his 18x22-inch mammoth plate images were very well received by the public, and by scientists such as Josiah D. Whitney, William Henry Brewer, and Clarence King. In a game of one-upsmanship, Charles Weed returned to the valley in 1864, and Watkins returned in 1865 with an even bigger camera with a higher quality lens.

Explain that the wet plate collodion process was an extraordinarily labor intensive photographic process. The artist would have to work quickly. First he had to clean a sheet of plate glass perfectly, removing any dust, lint, streaks, and so forth. Second, in the darkness of a tent, he coated the plate in a viscous, light-sensitive mixture of chemicals called collodion. Third, while the plate was still wet with collodion, the photographer would place the plate in a light-proof plate holder, slip it into the enormous cabinet of the large-format view camera, and remove a lens cap or board from the front of the lens or the front of the plate holder (he would have already trained and focused his lens on his subject), and make an exposure of a few seconds. The lens cap or board would be replaced, and the still-wet plate taken back to the dark tent, and developed, fixed, and varnished using a number of different chemical solutions.

The prints were made from the glass negatives (the negative-making process is described above) and then printed on albumen-coated paper. Photographic chemicals, namely silver salts, had to be bound to paper using albumen, or egg whites. The albumen printing process included the following steps: first, a piece of paper is coated with an emulsion of egg white (albumen) and table salt (sodium chloride), then dried. The albumen seals the paper and creates a slightly glossy surface. Second, the paper is dipped in a solution of silver nitrate and water, rendering the surface light-sensitive. Third, the paper is dried in total darkness. Fourth, the dried, prepared paper is placed in a frame in direct contact under a negative, often a glass negative with collodion emulsion, and exposed to light until the image achieves the desired level of darkness. Fifth, a bath of sodium thiosulfate fixes the print’s exposure, preventing further darkening. Finally, optional gold or selenium toning improves the photograph’s tone and stabilizes it against fading (e.g. the Weed photograph from 1864).

Explain to guests that Watkins and his contemporaries created both mammoth plate photographs and smaller stereoviews. Like their painter counterparts, the photographers sold their mammoth plate prints to discerning collectors, often wealthy patrons including the likes of Leland Stanford and Collis P. Huntington, and their smaller stereoviews to tourists and armchair travelers elsewhere in the country.

Marks on the Land: An Exhibition of The Altered Landscape, the Carol Franc Buck Collection Tour Blueprint

December 16, 2007-May 4, 2008

Introduction

Edward Burtynksy, Nickel Tailings #36, Sudbury, Ontario (1996)

This survey of The Altered Landscape, the Carol Franc Buck Collection consists of fourteen photographic prints depicting different kinds of human marks on the land. From the impermanent conceptual marks made by Jim Sanborn in his landscape-scale light projections, to the far more insidious and permanent scars on the land made by mining operations depicted in Terry Evans’ and Edward Burtynsky’s photographs, each of the eight artists in this survey grapples with ideas about how and why people make land-marks—and what effects the marks have on our perception, understanding, and relationship to the land.

The exhibition lends itself to discussions of landscape history (à la Jennifer Bethke’s recent Museum School class), how people treat different kinds of landscapes, and how we learn to understand landscapes and identify ourselves in relation to them.

This exhibition is presented as part of the NMA Art + Environment exhibition series, an initiative that brings community, artists, and scholars together to explore the interaction between people and their environments

The Altered Landscape, the Carol Franc Buck Collection

As you know, The Altered Landscape Collection is the largest collection within the museum—numbering more than 600 pieces—and is made up almost exclusively of contemporary photography, beginning with The New Topographics, and more contemporary work that has grown out of that movement. Historically important twentieth-century photography—that of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, in particular—has been added to the collection to contextualize the work within the collection, as well as within the history of twentieth-century photography in general.

If the NMA is known nationally for its collections, it is known for The Altered Landscape Collection specifically. Beginning in the mid-1990s, the museum began acquiring photography for a new signature focus collection. The museum’s motivation was to gather landscape works that would address audiences across cultural boundaries and, over time, to position the Museum as a unique visual and intellectual resource. The NMA sought to highlight environmental issues, already emphasized in other areas of the Museum’s collection, and provide a forum for the study and appreciation of land, environment, and environmental thought in art. The NMA’s goal was to recognize the tremendous contribution that photographers have made to our understanding of place and environment, while building its collection in a new direction.

The Altered Landscape is, at its core, about the American west, especially the Great Basin. As the eastern landscapes depicted by the Hudson River School painters gradually disappeared through conversion to human settlement, the west assumed a greater role as the representative of the idea of “wilderness.” For generations, photographers such as William Henry Jackson, Timothy O’Sullivan, Carleton E. Watkins, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Ansel Adams, and Eliot Porter played a leading role in how the landscape was perceived. Their imagery projected and reinforced a romanticized view of the environment in which landscape is an expression of a beautiful and sublime ‘nature.’

By the mid-1970s, however, a small group of photographers, including Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Frank Gohlke began to challenge this traditional view. In the influential exhibition at George Eastman House in 1975 titled “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape,” these photographers focused on contemporary industrial culture—land transformed by human presence. Collectively, they rejected the approach of viewing landscape as beauty, for the “sake of art,” isolated from the context of culture. For the New Topographics photographers, as they came to be known, landscape photography needed to reveal a new artistic viewpoint in response to the specific content of the images. For them, and those that followed, landscape photography needed to challenge traditional notions about land and landscape, beauty, and the nature and purposes of photography. It is in this context that we find the newest exhibition of works from this collection.

The current exhibition’s images depict landscapes in the American West and elsewhere that have been marked in some way—physically, conceptually, artistically, irrevocably— documented by photographers such as Richard Misrach and Terry Evans. The critical edge to some of the works in the exhibition is very clear: Robert Dawson and Edward Burtynsky subtly characterize marks on the land caused by dams and mining operations, for example. Others, such as Jim Sanborn and John Pfahl, photograph other kinds of marks: impermanent light projections of which the only record is the photograph, and more physical, yet still temporary, marks made on the land in the conceptual photographs of John Pfahl.

Orientation

You’ll find the exhibition hung in the Altered Landscape Gallery. The east and north walls feature photographs of much more physical marks on the land: Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of nickel tailings in the surface water in Ontario, Canada, for example. On the south and west walls are photographs of marks that are more conceptual in nature: John Pfahl’s photographs of temporary but still physical lines on the side of a shed, images of Christo’s monumentally-sized landscape installations, or Jim Sanborn’s photos of light projections on geologic formations in the west.

Vocabulary

Silver Gelatin print
Photograph on paper or plasticized paper coated with an emulsion of light-sensitive silver salts suspended in gelatin, printed out or developed out, and fixed. Came into general use in the 1880s; the developed variety remains the standard black-and-white photographic process.

Dye Transfer print (e.g. Polaroid).
Self-developing color photograph. The complex process, first described by Edwin Land in 1947, has been popular among amateurs and artists since the early 1960s.

Chromogenic print (also chromogenic dye coupler or C-Type print)
The most common type of color photograph, printed from a chromogenic color negative; consists of dyes within gelatin layers on a plastic-coated paper base. Subject to fading and color shifts in dark storage and on exhibition. Developed in the 1940s as an outgrowth of chromogenic color transparencies (Kodachrome, invented in 1935). Used by amateurs and artists alike. (Also called "C-print" or referred to by various brand names.)

Tour Framework

• Explain that the Altered Landscape, Carol Franc Buck Collection is the largest collection in the NMA permanent collection, and that it contains almost 700 photographs that depict landscapes changed at the hands of humans, primarily from the second half of the twentieth century forward.

• Ask guests what they see in Robert Dawson’s photograph “Spillway, Lake Berryessa, California.”

• Explain that Robert Dawson is a San Francisco-based photographer whose work deals primarily with altered landscapes of the west. This photograph depicts a dam on the Putah Creek in Solano/Napa Counties in California.

• Ask guests what kind of message(s) Dawson’s photograph conveys about the spillway.

• Invite guests to look at James Turrell’s photograph “Roden Crater Low Aerial Oblique Looking Toward N.E.”

• Ask guests what they think they are seeing in the photograph. Does anyone know where the Roden Crater is located, or why it exists?

• Explain that Roden Crater is a volcanic crater located at the edge of the Painted Desert near Flagstaff, Arizona. James Turrell is primarily a sculptor and installation artist, who has a mining claim on the Roden Crater. He has spent more than twenty years opening caverns in the interior of the crater, creating an open air observatory for viewing stars without the aid of a telescope.

• Ask guests to compare the Turrell image and the Dawson image. What are the differences between the human-made marks on the land in the images?

• Explain that Richard Misrach’s photograph “Battleground Point #21” is an image of a part of the Carson Sink, northeast of Fallon, Nevada.

Richard Misrach, Battleground Point #21, 1999.

• Ask guests to consider Terry Evans’ photograph before they look at or learn its title. What do guests think they are seeing in the image?

• Explain that the image depicts a gravel pit north of Kanopolis, Kansas. In her artwork, Terry Evans has photographed sites all over the Midwest, particularly in and around Chicago.

• Ask guests what kinds of things the artist might be choosing to emphasize by taking an aerial photograph of a landscape instead of a “traditional” landscape photograph?

• Ask guests to consider Edward Burtynsky’s photographs before their perceptions are directed by the wall labels and the works’ titles. What do the images appear to be of? Do they look anything like, say, the Yellowstone National Park mud springs or something similar?

• Explain that the images are Burtynsky’s depictions of the effects on the landscape of dangerous nickel tailings near Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. The tailings have polluted both the ground and surface water of this area near Lake Huron in the Great Lakes region.

• Ask guests to compare the marks on the land in Evans’ and Burtynsky’s photographs. In what ways are they similar? In what ways are they different?

• Ask guests if they thought of the photographs as beautiful initially. Why? Does the information about the subject of the photographs affect their beauty? Why or why not?

• Ask guests to consider how the photographs by Burtynsky, Evans, Dawson, Turrell, and Misrach are different from the photographs of Sanborn, Pfahl, and Volz. How are the marks made on the land different between and among them?

• Explain that one of the ways the marks are different has to do with documenting the relationships people have to land. For example, Burtynsky and Dawson document mining and hydroelectric marks made on the land, whereas Pfahl, Sanborn, and Volz document temporary or ephemeral marks made for a very different artistic purpose. Why? What are the artistic purposes or intents of the different photographs?

• Ask guests to look carefully at the grid of John Pfahl photographs on the west wall of the gallery. What does Pfahl focus the viewers’ attention upon in the image? How can you tell? Why would he choose this as a subject?

Pfahl explains the images this way: “The added elements suggest numerous mark-making devices associated with photographs, maps, plans an diagrams. On different occasions, they may pointedly repeat a strong formal element in the landscape…; they may fill in information suggested by the scen….; they may depend upon information external to the photograph itself…; or, finally, they may be only arbitrarily related to the scene….”

• Explain to guests that Pfahl photographs scenes in which he, the artist, has inserted temporary visual aids to create his photographs: string, tape, or wire, for example, that heighten the visual characteristics of the photographs.

• Explain that Jim Sanborn is a sculptor and photographer who is very interested in conceptual understanding in art, as well as physics, light, and landscape.

Sanborn explains: “My original intention was to recreate in some way the work of the nineteenth-century cartographers and photographers who were hired to map and photograph the monumental western landscape.[…] Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Smithson, James Turrell, and other artists were doing large-scale installations in the natural environment. Those projects affected the land tremendously, and not always with a pleasing effect on the environment. Bulldozers were brought onto the land, and the land itself was manipulated. I decided to counteract that in some way and still do very large outdoor installations. I had completed several in the early 1970s in which I placed objects in the environment, and the end result was photographs of the outdoor installations.

• Explain that Sanborn built his own large-scale projectors to project light onto geologic landforms. He then photographed the projections, leaving no trace of the large-scale artwork that he had created; the only record of the work is the photograph.

• Ask guests to consider the Wolgang Volz photographs of Christo and Jean-Claude’s “Running Fence” and “Valley Curtain” projects. In what ways are these photographs different from others in the exhibition? What kinds of marks on the land do the photographs document?

• Ask guests to consider the multi-layering of artistic decisions in the photographs. Not only does the photographer-as-artist decide how to frame and compose his image of the subject, but Christo and Jean-Claude have also made artistic decisions regarding the placement and purpose of their installation of cloth and anchors in the landscape.

Conclusion

Art facilitates learning by engaging the senses, bypassing conditioned patterns of thinking and allowing other ways of knowing to come forward, sometimes subtly, and sometimes forcefully. All of the photographers in this exhibition engage our senses—but for very different reasons and purposes. Whether the works focus on natural, cultural, or political aspects of the environment, artists have always been sensitive to environments and responsive to our relationship to environments.

Nosotros por Nosotros: Latinos in Nevada Tell Their History

In an effort to promote cross-cultural understanding and awareness, the Latino Research Center of the University of Nevada, Reno, recently distributed five hundred disposable cameras to Nevada’s Latino communities, asking them to tell their stories using photographs. Second-grade soccer players, middle-aged casino workers, and seasoned professionals captured their daily experiences, creating a rich and diverse language of imagery. Nosotros por Nosotros features a selection of these photographs and investigates the traditions and transitions experienced by Nevada’s Latino community.

The essence of the phrase “Nosotros por Nosotros” cannot be translated, but even its literal Spanish meaning—“us by us”—implies a strong sense of personal identity and community. The project was envisioned as a way to empower Latinos to create, rather than adopt, their own cultural identities—ones untainted by stereotypical labels placed upon them by others. At the same time, the images provide non-Latino populations with an opportunity to dispel their misperceptions about Hispanic cultures.

This exhibition is presented in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, an annual celebration that runs from September 15 to October 14, 2007. As a part of the Nosotros por Nosotros project, the Latino Research Center will create a publication and accompanying CD with additional images and oral histories. These materials will be distributed to every library in the state of Nevada. In this way, the Latino Research Center hopes to sustain the message of the Nosotros por Nosotros project: to capture and reveal the interwoven voices of Nevada’s Latino population.

The Nosotros por Nosotros project is generously funded by the Hart Foundation and the University of Nevada, Reno, College of Liberal Arts.

The Road to Reno: Inge Morath Tour Blueprint

Introduction, from The Road to Reno: Inge Morath, by John P. Jacob, The Inge Morath Foundation

Inge Morath was born in Graz, Austria, in 1923. She studied languages in Berlin, and after the Second World War became Austrian editor for Heute magazine. A friend of photographer Ernst Haas, Morath wrote articles to accompany his photographs. Together, they were invited to Paris by Robert Capa to join the recently founded Magnum Photos, where she worked as an editor. Morath began photographing in 1951, and assisted Henri Cartier-Bresson as a researcher in 1953-54. She became a member of Magnum in 1955.

In the following years, Morath traveled extensively in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and the United States. Her knowledge of history and facility with languages, including Russian, Romanian, and Mandarin as well as English, Spanish, and French, provided Morath with a unique perspective into the people and places she visited. After her marriage to Arthur Miller in 1962, Morath settled in New York and Connecticut. She and Miller traveled to the USSR together in 1965, and in 1978 they made the first of many trips to the People’s Republic of China. In the 1980s and ‘90s, Morath continued to pursue both assignments and independent projects. She died in 2002, leaving a photographic archive encompassing more than fifty years of her life.

Inge Morath was a serious and gifted reporter who could not resist infusing a touch of surrealism into her photographs. This playful element lifted her work above mere reportage by revealing the mysterious at work within the ordinary and the everyday. It has been the distinguishing feature by which Morath’s photographs have, until now, been recognized. Another gift is her feeling for places: her pictures of […]artists’ studios and cemetery memorials, are permeated with the spirit of invisible people still present.

[…] Morath carried her portable typewriter wherever she traveled, as indispensable as her cameras. Words, as much as film, were her medium. Attempting to be true to both her process and her voice, [this exhibition] follows Morath’s markings on her contact sheets to determine the selection and the flow of images, while leaving her non-native English, with its typographic charms and frequent structural indulgences, intact. In combining the three distinct elements of her work, images, journal writings, and caption notes, The Road to Reno presents Morath’s work as she created it: as a story.

What is most unique about this particular story is that it has never before been publicly told. It is the story of Morath’s encounter with her own future; with Arthur Miller who would become her husband, and with the United States, which would become her adoptive homeland. Until recently, Morath’s American road trip was unknown outside the circle of her family and friends. […]Inge Morath, setting out with Henri Cartier-Bresson (on assignment across the country to the film set of The Misfits) defines the vertices of her route simply: 18 days; New York to Reno; a friend, camera and a typewriter. […] Morath’s 18 days on the road stitch a trajectory through July and through 1960, leaving room between her careful photographs and her astute, poetic written observations […]

Exhibition and Tour Details

The Road to Reno: Inge Morath exhibition is organized by The Inge Morath Foundation, created by her family members and Magnum Photos in Morath’s name to document, promote, and care for the work created during her 60-year career. In its first several weeks, The Road to Reno: Inge Morath exhibition has proven to be much more interesting to, and popular among, visitors than we had anticipated that it would. As a result, there is reason to consider making the exhibition a fairly significant portion of your tours, particularly after “Andy Warhol’s Dream America” closes in May but before “Deborah Butterfield: Horses” opens in mid-June.

Orientation

You’ll find the exhibition in the third floor feature gallery north, where the Voces Latinas exhibition was located previously. The exhibition tells the story of Morath’s and Henri Cartier-Bresson’s trip across the country to document the filming of the 1961 film The Misfits, directed by John Huston, written by Arthur Miller, and starring Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, Eli Wallach, and Thelma Ritter. Morath and Cartier-Bresson set out from New York and spent 18 days traversing the U.S., heading south and eventually west before ending in Reno in July, 1960. The exhibition is laid out chronologically and counterclockwise—that is, you’ll encounter the earliest images in their trip first (they’re in the hallway) and the final images, documenting the actual sets of the filming of The Misfits, to the left of the main portion of the gallery.

Tour Framework

Explain that the exhibition contains photography created by Inge Morath, who was given the opportunity to travel across the country to document the filming of the 1960 film The Misfits. Explain that Morath had begun her photography career in Europe in 1950-51, and then became affiliated with the Magnum Photos agency herself in 1955, with other well-known documentary photographers of the mid-twentieth century, including Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Explain that Arthur Miller, who Morath married in 1962, had written the screenplay for The Misfits for his then-wife Marilyn Monroe.

Invite guests to consider the impact of Morath’s photography: how does she depict the places that she visits on her way to Reno? Does she seem to be creating a portrait of America? What kind of portrait?

Explain that Morath not only documented the trip and the sets in her photgraphy, but that she also kept a journal of type-written notes. In fact, Morath, after marrying Miller in 1962, was a prolific collaborator with her husband—they created a number of book projects together, in addition to the more than a dozen photography books of her own.

Ask guests to consider Morath’s eye for the mundane and humorous in everyday life. Do / can they get a sense of Morath’s sense of humor from her photographs? How? While humorous, even ironic at times, are they also respectful of their subjects? How can you tell?

Ask guests to look closely at the contact sheets (a reference print of film negatives produced by laying negatives directly on print paper and then exposing the paper to light, resulting in a actual-size print of the negative strip including the frame numbers which appear along the edge of the film stock). What kinds of information is documented on the contact sheets? What does it suggest about how Morath made choices about which photographs would become her final prints?

Ask guests to consider whether Morath seems to try to define her subjects with her photographs, or whether she seems to capture fleeting moments that pass quickly.