Early Yosemite Photos

(Yosemite - Stream and Half-Dome, Photo: Carleton Watkins, from: yosemite.ca.us)

Carleton Watkins was one of the first photographers to capture the grandeur of California's Yosemite Valley. He was also one of the first to produce stereo photos of Yosemite:

According to Smithsonian Magazine (video slideshow available at link):

(Stereograph of El Capitan, Photo: Carleton Watkins, Library of Congress collection, via Smithsonian Magazine)

Carleton Watkins' Yosemite pictures brought him worldwide acclaim and were groundbreaking technically and artistically. He was arguably the most artistic American landscape photographer in the 19th century. In 1862, Oliver Wendell Holmes, the pre-eminent photography critic of the day, praised Watkins and wrote that he had achieved "a perfection of art which compares with the finest European work."

While Watkins won many prestigious awards for his photography, his business and personal life was troubled:

In 1868, Watkins was awarded a medal for landscape photography at the Paris International Exposition. In 1873 he received the Medal of Progress award at the Vienna Exposition, and in 1876 he exhibited his pictures at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, and at the Chilean Exposition. He associated with California's intellectual and artistic elite. But Watkins’ life was not a completely charmed one. His images were pirated, and his lack of business acumen resulted in bankruptcy. He became ill and disabled and spent the last years of his life in an insane asylum.

Fortunately, his landscapes live on, a testament to his skill as a self-taught photographer, and to the beauty of the American West.

(Yosemite - Stream and Half-Dome, Photo: Carleton Watkins, from: yosemite.ca.us)

Watkins clearly had a flair for composition. With the marvel of digital photography, where even cell phones have high resolution cameras built in and pocket-sized cameras can produce excellent, poster-sized Photoshopped prints, it's easy to forget that early photographic equipment was far more primitive. Watkins used a camera with 22 by 18 inch glass-plate negatives, in addition to a stereo camera, and had to lug hundreds of pounds of camera and darkroom equipment via mule train to create his images.

(Yosemite Valley, Three Brothers, Photo: Carleton Watkins, from OAC. Click to enlarge)

When we think of Yosemite photographers, Ansel Adams gorgeous images come to mind. A half-century before, however, it was Carleton Watkins' images that first brought the visual glory of that special place to the public, both here and abroad.