Art

Carleton Watkins in Yosemite

Carleton Watkins in Yosemite

By Weston Naef

For Carleton E. Watkins to create his massive photographs of Yosemite Valley, he traveled, most likely, from San Francisco to Stockton by boat; from Modesto to Bear Valley and Mariposa by wagon; and on to a guest house at the edge of Mariposa Grove by day-long horseback ride. From there, Watkins and a crew hauled about a ton of equipment — cameras, lenses, tripods, and a portable dark room — 75 miles to Yosemite Valley, over sometimes steep terrain.

Watkins shot 700 photographs of Yosemite Valley, including 200 large format ones, which required glass plates the size of the print, or about 18 by 22 inches, and a camera that could hold the plates. It’s unclear how exactly he managed to build such a camera.

Carleton Watkins in Yosemite, by the J. Paul Getty Museum’s Department of Photographs founder and senior curator Weston Naef, features 49 of these extra-large prints, arranged roughly as Watkins himself numbered his works: to correspond to the experience of traveling the valley.

Naef’s introduction offers a biography of Watkins, whose life and work cries for the epic Paul Thomas Anderson treatment – projecting Watkins’ old, grand West on the big screen is likely as close as we can come to experiencing the sensation of seeing a large Watkins print a century and a half ago. The photographer spent his boyhood in distant New York, traveling to California via Panama with his boyhood friend, who would go on to build the Central Pacific Railroad. He is believed to have apprenticed with daguerreotypist Robert Vance in South America, before trying to cash in on the Gold Rush.

When his attempt at mining failed, Watkins, with the help of a few well-placed friends in mining and tourism, launched a thriving photography career that only faltered when a bank panic put his negatives in the hands of creditors, who took possession of many of his negatives and began issuing prints. (“Watkins was placed in the unusual position of competing against his own work,” Naef notes.) Watkins died, having had much of his work consumed by the 1906 San Francisco fires and having briefly lived in a rail car, but also having influenced Abraham Lincoln to put Yosemite in the public domain, and having a mountain peak named after him (like Ansel Adams decades later).

Watkins did photograph the peak, reflected (aptly) in Mirror Lake, in an image that Naef says “can be seen as symbolic of the act of photography itself” – the inversion of an image through a lens that lets the photographer see it clearly. Naef’s arrangement of the plates juxtaposes shots from Watkins’ various excursions to Yosemite, sometimes separated by a decade or more, but on which he stopped in many of the same places, only slightly altering his compositions – new foregrounds, shots of moving water, a shift in framing. The final three plates in the collection are from Watkins’ later years shooting the valley and are similar and starkly effective: steep, dark cliffs and trees frame a distant landmark, seemingly shot from mid air or some unsuitable ground, capturing the breadth of the valley and its contents, grand and dark, known and unknown.

Excerpt: “A little more than fifty years after his introduction to photography and thousands of pictures later, the April 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire destroyed much of his life’s work, including a trunk full of daguerreotypes from his earliest years that he had diligently preserved over four decades. Impoverished and demoralized, he lived for a time at the turn of the twentieth century with his wife and children in a railroad car and died blind and penniless in the Napa State Hospital in 1916.”

Further Reading: In Focus: Carleton E. Watkins and Print the Legend: Photography and the American West


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