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Yo Semite Falls. 2630 ft.

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: July 1861
Medium: Stereograph, glass
Culture: American
Department: Photographs
Institution: Getty Museum
Object ID: 2cd64d0c-62f0-482c-a3ff-4174fe2d078a

From the Getty Museum record

This stereograph demonstrates Carleton Watkins's preoccupation with the foreground as a defining element of space in his landscape photographs. Although Yosemite Falls is the principal subject, the strongly vertical trees and the cabin with its diagonal striping of sunlight and shadow dominate the image. Nevertheless, the falls are perfectly framed between the trees just above the cabin, their distance evident in the severe shift in tone between the area of the foreground and the mountains. When viewed through the stereoscope viewer, which gives a three-dimensional effect, the contrast between the planes of focus becomes even more apparent.

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