Carleton Watkins Man Without a Face
considered as possibly just the publisher and not maker of the negatives.[19]
Let's look at a typical page of the LFC Album [Fig. 15]. In addition to the already noted Pacific Railroad and Pacific Coast landscape images, throughout the LFC Album are a number of portraits of theatrical personalities, some identified only by their stage names, such as "Aimée" and "'Sara' the Kicker [Fig. 14]." Among the other performers represented in the LFC Album are, Knight Asten, C. A. Bennett, Alice Dunning, Dickie Lingard, Adelaide Neilson, Addie Rodgers, Clara Vesey, and Ellie Wilton. Alice Dunning, Dickie Lingard (stage name of Harriet Dunning), and Aimée are known to have made stage appearances in San Francisco in 1877-78,[20] about when those portraits would have been made.
What event could Watkins and his friends have been celebrating that called for the elaborately crafted costume consisting of a hat like a camera and a suit covered with photographs? In wearing this outrageous suit of clothes, Watkins could have been humorously staking out a claim as the archetypal camera-man in the San Francisco Bay Area of the 1870s and before. If we let the imagination run wild let's propose that the Camera Man costume could have been created for an event like the gala party on April 12, 1872[21] organized to celebrate the grand opening of Watkins's expanded and relocated Yosemite Gallery at 22-26 Montgomery St. Another possibility was a Bohemian Club High Jinks such as the performance honoring Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes on February 28, 1874, directed by C. T. Deane.[22] Holmes was an articulate writer on photography and had showered praise on Watkins calling his work "a perfection of art."[23] Watkins was an honorary member of the Bohemian Club and he would have been a fitting member of the cast.
[19] The relationship between Watkins and Hart will be studied later in this publication.
[20] With thanks to Matthew C. Morrocco.
[21] San Francisco Alta California, 13 April 1872, cited in Palmquist 1983, p. 43.
[22]Porter Garnett, Bohemian Jinks: A Treatise, San Francisco: Bohemian Club, 1908, p. 117, with thanks to Bill Carter.
[23] Oliver Wendell Holmes, "Doings of the Sunbeam," Atlantic Monthly, vol. 12, no. 6 (July 1863), p. 8