A master of the lansdcape photograph.

One reason I spend as little time as possible looking at modern landscape photography is that it pretty much peaked with the work of Carleton Watkins, some 150 years ago. Since then we have had the blight of Ansel Adams and his garishly over-processed oeuvre, the damage further compounded by legions of his acolytes who appear never to have had an original idea in their lives, judging by their slavish copying of the work of that poseur. Adams has been good for sales of high end gear and just awful for the art of photography.

Cape Horn by Carleton Watkins, 1867.

Click the image to go to a Slate article profiling many of Watkins’s photographs, the originals in the Stanford University library.