Carleton Watkins

Carleton Watkins (1829–1916) was an American photographer whose large-format photographs of Yosemite and the American West helped shape how the region was seen and represented.

Yosemite Valley from the Best General View: A celebrated Watkins photograph showing Yosemite Valley from a high overlook. This view exemplifies the commanding compositions that made his Yosemite photographs widely recognizable.
Mammoth plate photography: A photographic practice using exceptionally large glass negatives, often around 18 by 22 inches. Watkins’s monumental Yosemite views depended on negatives large enough to preserve fine detail.
San Francisco photography: Photographic practice and commerce in San Francisco, a major center of nineteenth-century western photography. Watkins established his career in a city whose boom created demand for portraits and views.
Abraham Lincoln: The 16th president of the United States, who signed the Yosemite Grant Act in 1864. The federal grant signed by Lincoln placed Yosemite’s preservation within national political history.
The Three Brothers, Yosemite: A Watkins photograph depicting the Three Brothers rock formation in Yosemite Valley. Its layered cliffs show how he translated Yosemite’s scale into a carefully ordered image.
Wet-plate collodion process: A nineteenth-century photographic process that coated glass plates with collodion and exposed them while wet. This process was central to making Watkins’s large glass negatives in the field.
California Gold Rush: The migration and mining boom in California after gold was discovered in 1848. The Gold Rush brought Watkins west and helped form the markets in which he worked.
Frederick Law Olmsted: An American landscape architect and writer who advocated public access to natural scenery. Olmsted’s preservation argument and Watkins’s images both helped make Yosemite a public concern.
Cathedral Rocks, Yosemite: A Watkins photograph of the granite spires known as Cathedral Rocks in Yosemite Valley. The image pairs monumental rock forms with the valley’s characteristic light and depth.
Albumen print: A photographic print made with light-sensitive silver salts suspended in egg-white on paper. Watkins used albumen printing to turn glass negatives into detailed, distributable photographs.

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