A Visionary of the American West Carleton Emmons Watkins was not a painter, but a master photographer whose lens captured the raw, untamed majesty of the nineteenth-century American West. Born in Oneonta, New York, his journey to the Pacific was driven by the same spirit of discovery that fueled the California Gold Rush. Arriving in San Francisco around 1851, Watkins initially sought fortune in the mining boom, yet he found his true calling not in the pursuit of gold, but in the pursuit of light and landscape. His transition into the world of photography was almost accidental; while working…