We are honored to announce that Tyler Green and his book Carleton Watkins: Making the West American have won the 2018 California Book Awards‘s Gold Medal for Contribution to Publishing. The medal comes with a $5000 prize and will be presented at the San Francisco Commonwealth Club on Monday, June 10, 6 p.m. To browse a selection of Carleton Watkins photographs, visit Tyler Green’s website.

Founded in 1931, the California Book Awards “recognize the state’s best writers and illuminate the wealth and diversity of literature written in California.” Congratulations to Tyler Green!

Carleton Watkins
Making the West American

by Tyler Green

“…the book is convincing in its central argument, relating the sublimity of Watkins’s photography to American Transcendentalism, particularly the poetry of Emerson. It is also quite beautiful on the meanings of early Californian culture. In this sense Green’s research is not just about Watkins, but about the significance of the American West, and in some ways the definition of America itself. Ultimately, the book makes a strong case for photography as the first and most American art: much like Watkins’s work, Making the West American is at once technical and transcendent.”—Aperture

“Tyler Green’s achievement here is monumental. This book takes the familiar narrative of the formation of the American West and brings an entirely new perspective to it, beautifully positioning Watkins’s work within the history of California, and indeed the nation.”—Corey Keller, Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

FacebookTwitterTumblrLinkedInEmail