I’ve never been to Yosemite National Park—I haven’t hiked to Half
Dome or felt the spray of Bridalveil Fall—yet its views are familiar to
me. For that, I have Carleton Watkins to thank. His is not a household
name, but the landscapes he photographed are now recognized worldwide.
Before the trails of our National Parks were laid, before the National
Parks were even established, Watkins made photographs of Yosemite that
would shape and protect the future of that wilderness. The Yosemite Falls 2634 ft.
Launch Gallery
Photography was only a little over 30 years old when he made his
first trip to Yosemite in 1861. (He would later return in 1865, which is
when he made the images that are featured in this post).
Point-and-shoot cameras didn’t exist. 35mm film wasn’t even invented
yet. That meant cameras were big and cumbersome. To better understand
the process Watkins used to make his iconic images, I spoke with
Elizabeth Kathleen Mitchell, the curator of a Watkins exhibition
currently on view Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center.
Mitchell explains that Watkins custom built a camera designed to hold
18” x 22” glass-plate negatives, which were even bigger than most other
large-format negatives used at the time. Compared to the ease of working
with 35mm film, which is made of emulsion-coated plastic and measures
just over one inch in length, working with those aptly named “mammoth”
glass plates was a huge undertaking. The Yosemite Valley from the “Best General View”
Launch Gallery
Part of the reason Watkins’s images still wow us is that his process
was so labor intensive. “Now when we’re in Yosemite, we can whip out our
smartphones and take high-quality photographs very easily. Watkins had
to pack in a literal ton of equipment, at least on one of his trips, on
mules. For Watkins, taking a photograph meant undertaking an incredible
feat of physical endurance, of planning, of logistics,” says Mitchell.
In order to help the modern reader appreciate his process, I broke down Watkins’s procedure into four simplified steps:
1. Carry 2,000 pounds of equipment—the equivalent of two
horses—including mammoth glass plates, flammable chemicals, and a
makeshift darkroom, on mules through the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
2. Make the glass plates photosensitive by coating them with said
flammable chemicals in total darkness, being careful to keep all dust,
pollen, and other matter off the plates. (Keep in mind Watkins was doing
this in a makeshift darkroom in the wilderness).
3. Immediately put the light-sensitive glass plate into the camera in order to properly expose iconic vista.
4. Once exposed, process the negative with the appropriate chemicals
to permanently fix the image onto the glass for future printing.
There was little room for error in this multi-step process. If a
scene was overexposed or out of focus he would have to start with a
fresh piece of glass. Watkins was able to print the negatives onto paper
at a later time, but he had to be certain that he got the images he
needed before leaving Yosemite—to change the camera angle in just one
frame would require another expedition. Mirror View of El Capitan, Yosemite
Launch Gallery
His finished prints were artfully composed, highly detailed, and
masterfully printed, but most importantly, they made visible the vistas
that were otherwise inaccessible to the average person. “He created an
image of the American west for the world. His photographs were exhibited
on the east coast, even in exhibitions in Europe. And this area of the
world that people were absolutely fascinated by, they’d been reading
about. He gave them a large scale visual record of it,” says Mitchell. Section of the Grizzly Giant, 33 ft. diameter
Launch Gallery
She explains that in addition to selling prints and having
exhibitions, Watkins produced bound sets of photos. “That’s how the
photographs that he took in 1861 reached Washington D.C. and came to the
attention of this 38th American congress, and probably President
Lincoln as well. That then inspired them to pass the Yosemite Grant Act in 1864 and protect the land for private use.” Washington Column, 2082 ft., Yosemite
Launch Gallery
These days images of Yosemite and other National Parks are
ubiquitous; some might even call them commonplace or cliché. As
photographers Abelardo Morell and Peter Essick discussed in a recent conversation on Proof,
it’s become a challenge to capture and communicate the splendor of a
place that attracts millions of visitors each year. Watkins’s images
have become a small part of the massive visual archive of Yosemite.
Taken today, they might have even been lost in the hundreds of thousands
of depictions. But his photographs will always be part of the reason
that the Yosemite of the 1860’s is still recognizable to us in 2014, and
that is quite the legacy. Mirror View of the North Dome, Yosemite
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