First View of the Yosemite Valley from the Mariposa Trail
Carleton Watkins (American, 1829-1916)
1865/66
- Medium
- Albumen print
- Classification
- Photograph
- Dimensions
- Image/paper: 39.9 × 52.4 cm (15 3/4 × 20 11/16 in.); Mount: 47.4 × 61 cm (18 11/16 × 24 1/16 in.)
- Culture
- United States
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Photography and Media
- Credit line
- Laura T. Magnuson and Maurice D. Galleher Endowments
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Kids profiles and older: it shows nature, places, still life or a children's book. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
In the 1860s, Carleton Watkins was the first to document the untouched wilderness that would become Yosemite National Park. Transporting his fragile equipment on mule or carriage through difficult terrain, Watkins used a "mammoth-plate" camera whose glass negatives measured up to 18 by 22 inches and yielded remarkably detailed prints of the same size. He favored spectacular compositions with dramatic spatial depth. In this photograph, Watkins depicted Yosemite Valley's immense span through the receding planes of mountains and the giant Sequoia trees that frame them. Watkins printed more than 1,100 mammoth-plate photographs over the course of his career. Unfortunately, the majority of his glass negatives and prints were destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
