The career of the American photographer Carleton E. Watkins (1829-1916) spanned more than fifty years. It is his giant photographs of Yosemite, from the "best general view," that most effectively articulate his artistic vision.

The J. Paul Getty Museum holds more than fourteen hundred pictures by Watkins, making him the best-represented nineteenth-century photographer in the collection. In Focus: Carleton Watkins features approximately fifty of these works, including mammoth plates, stereographs, albumen prints, and cabinet and boudoir cards. The plates are accompanied by commentaries written by Peter E. Palmquist, an independent scholar of the history of photography. Mr.

Palmquist, along with David Featherstone, Tom Fels, Weston Naef, David Robertson, and Amy Rule, were participants in a 1996 colloquium on Watkins and his career. An edited transcript of their discussion and a chronological overview of Watkins's life and art follow the plate section.