Carleton E. Watkins Late George Cling Peaches 1889

Watkins was a great artist but a terrible businessman. In 1875 he lost his San Francisco studio and his entire stock of negatives to creditors, and, as a result, he was actively soliciting commissions when he might otherwise have relied on income from printing existing negatives. One of Watkins’s best clients hired him to conduct a visual inventory of his vast property near Bakersfield, in Kern County, California, to entice people to buy land and settle there. Watkins obliged by exposing at least seven hundred 8-by-10-inch glass plate negatives, along with numerous even bigger “mammoth” plates, of which this is undeniably his finest.

On a printed label beneath the photograph are two statements: one by the property owner, attesting to the fertility of the land; another by the Kern County Board of Trade, certifying that the owner’s statement is true. Photography’s usefulness as evidence was established with its invention in 1839, and its fictive possibilities began to be exploited not long after that (thus the need for Kern County’s certificate).

Late George Cling Peaches distills space in a strikingly modern way, decades before such disturbances became commonplace; the void on the right-hand side of the image, created by two pairs of fuzzy fruit that don’t quite make contact, animates the eye’s path with the metaphorical potential of impenetrable depth.

Publication excerpt from MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art, New York (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019)