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The Yosemite Valley from Inspiration Pt. Mariposa Trail / [General View of the Valley - from Inspiration Point]

Creator

American Photographer · 1829–1916

AmbrotypistPublisherArtist

At twenty, Carleton Watkins headed out to California to make his fortune. After working as a daguerreotype operator in San Jose, he established his own practice and soon made his first visit to the Yosemite Valley. There he made thirty mammoth plate and one hundred stereograph views that were among the first photographs of Yosemite seen in the East. Partly on the strength of Watkins's photographs,

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Date: negative 1865–1866
Medium: Albumen silver print
Culture: American
Department: Photographs
Institution: Getty Museum
Object ID: 043159ee-2251-4291-9112-047dd9756c04

From the Getty Museum record

This sweeping view of the Yosemite Valley in winter was made from Inspiration Point on the Mariposa Trail. Yosemite's highest peak, El Capitan, rises at the left, a granite buttress 3,604 feet (1,098 meters) from the valley floor. At center right, almost lost in the photograph's dizzying detail, Bridalveil Fall streams down the mountainside, 620 feet (189 meters) of flowing white mist. Barely visible, Half Dome's crest forms an arc in the snowy center distance. The narrow foreground strip reveals that Carleton Watkins's camera was mere feet from the edge of Inspiration Point, giving the viewer a solid sense of being there, literally on the edge.

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