This volume is devoted to the smaller and more unusually-shaped works of Carleton E. Watkins, many of which have not been published before. The book also contains an overview of his life, and an edited transcript of a colloquium on his career.

The extraordinary body of work by photographer Carleton Watkins - taken between 1858 and 1891 - constitutes one of the longest and most productive careers in 19th-century American photography. This is an opulently illustrated catalogue of the entire remaining mammoth photographs of Carleton Watkins (1829-1916).