Carlton E. Watkins - photographer

Carlton E Watkins spent nearly 50 years photographing the California Backcountry - and his greatest fame were his stunning mammoth plate pictures of Yosemite. Watkins was the master of the artistic, real, untouched nature photography style, and he was an intrepid hiker willing to go to extreme efforts to reach locations for a good view. His work was the first Western landscape photography to gain the stature of fine art, and he sold his work out of an elegant gallery in downtown San Francisco next door to the elegant Palace Hotel.

Watkins had come to California as an eager 49er, via Panama, and in the company of Collis P. Huntington, who soon became a member of the Big Four millionaires. Watkins gained his first experience in photography by filling in at a portrait gallery, and soon found it would be the passion of his life. In 1861 he made his first trip to Yosemite, hauling a very large 18"x22" camera that took pictures of Yosemite that were the largest outdoor photographs in America at the time.

Imagine packing 12 mules to carry the camping and photographic supplies, with one mule for the dark room tent alone. His first stop was the Mariposa Grove of Big Trees where he took a rare photograph with a human being present to demonstrate the enormous scale of the trees. In the majority of his work, very little, and often no human evidence could be seen. These were images of the wilderness, the backcountry untouched by human hands.

The exposure time need to capture the landscape image required keeping the aperture of the lense open from the minutes to an hour, depending on the time of day. To avoid blurred shapes, he was very strategic in timing his photo shoots to coincide with early morning and late afternoon hours when the winds were at a minimum. And at these times, the natural shadows are the most pronounced, making for images with great depth and contrast. He also focused on images that revealed the amazing geology, with close-ups of the rocks textures contrasted by distant landscape forms.

But Watkins was not the first photographer to capture Yosemite on film. His predecessor was Charles L. Weed who took the first professional photographic images on an expedition in 1859. Weed has been part of the first tourist party to visit Yosemite in 1859, an adventure lead by James Mason Hutchings who soon would come to live year round in the Yosemite for many years of his life. Weeds earlier work differed from what Watkins was accomplishing. The comparison would be most easily described as he difference between landscape postcard photography and a fine art painting of the same landscape. Watkins work captured the spirit of the place, and the mystery of its remarkable natural formations and phenomenon.

"By 1864 collectors through out the United States, Great Britain, and Europe had bought his Yosemite views. In this same year an album of these prints helped convince Congress of the need to preserve Yosemite Valley, and doubtless influenced President Lincoln to approve the bill" that set Yosemite aside as a protected park. (As noted in Yosemite, its discovery, its wonders, and its people, by Margaret Sanborn; recommended reading).

In 1866, Watkins ventured deeper into the higher backcountry with a geological team of explorers and had the opportunity to capture views of the Yosemite from above the Valley looking down into and across its magnificent chasm. "Imbued with the general concern for rock, he included arresting foregrounds of ex-foliating granite in fine rounded slopes, merging with boulder fields that seemed to join the cliffs; then followed the flow of undulant ridges to a meeting with the far-off Sierra peaks - 'communicating the infinite gradations from pebble to mountain,' as one critic saw it" (M. Sanborn).

In 1867 Watkins opened his first gallery called Yosemite Art Gallery on san Francisco's Montgomery Street, and in the same year was honored to win a the only medal awarded in landscape photography at the Paris Exposition Universelle. Watkins also photographed the backcountry near Mt. Shasta and Mt. Lassen, the Columbia River in Oregon, and a series of the California missions. In 1888 he opened a second gallery next door to the elegant Palace Hotel and it also exhibited images of mining scenes in the Sierras, landscapes from Oregon, Utah, and Montana, San Francisco city scenes, close up studies of trees. But it was always his Yosemite prints that kept his business alive. On the side he did do portraits and photographed the homes, ranches, and gardens of the wealthy California families.


His early friend, Collis Huntington was by now a very wealthy railroad tycoon. He provided Watkins with railway cars to transport his equipment around the west, and eventually paid him for his Central Pacific railroad photography work over the years with an 80-acre ranch in Capay Valley in Yolo County where he lived out the remainder of his days with his wife and children.

"As the master of the Western landscape he set a standard for photographers who followed, many of whose careers might have been different had he not blazed the way. His classic style and candid expression of his own profound experience in nature, particularly in Yosemite, remained a major influence." (M. Sanborn)