Yosemite Valley: Vernal and Nevada Falls from Glacier Point

After the Civil War, the United States government invested great resources and energy to expand into the territories of the western part of the country. Although many photographers accompanied survey expeditions sponsored by government agencies, others like Carleton Watkins also worked independently. Watkins, who was among the earliest photographers working in Yosemite in 1861, produced awe-inspiring images such as this monumental view of Yosemite Valley. Using the mammoth plate format (18 × 22 in. glass negatives), Watkins was the first photographer to produce and sell a substantial number of photographs of the American West both on the West and East Coasts. His spectacular images of California-along with those of William Henry Jackson and Timothy O'Sullivan- are said to have inspired President Lincoln in 1864 to sign legislation giving Yosemite to the state of California to be preserved for public use, leading the way to the establishment of the US national parks system.

Harmonious and carefully constructed, Watkins's photographs provide a classic representation of the idealistic landscape, emphasizing clarity, light, and spatial recession. In the AMAM photograph, the viewer is placed-slightly off center- at the convergence of a mountainside at the left and a diagonal rock face and pine trees on the right. Watkins's composition allows the viewer not only to absorb the scale of the foreground elements and detail, but also to comprehend the awesome scale and variety of natural features as one's eye travels down the cliffs and through the landscape by way of rivers and ravines. Light, dark, and shadow are captured just at the point when they merge to sculpt landscape surfaces.

Watkins's exposures captured the wonder and emotion of the American sublime and communicated the scale of the American West to a fascinated public. The wet plate process, however, required long exposure times-sometimes as much as one hour for Watkins's mammoth plates, because he often photographed early in the morning or late in the afternoon to capitalize on the contrasting light and shadows falling over the landscape. As a result, the skies in Watkins's photographs often remained featureless, and he is known to have added clouds artificially by sandwiching glass negatives in his exposures or by hand-working the sky with pigment to simulate cloud effects.