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Cathedral Spires - Yo Semite

Creator

American Photographer · 1829–1916

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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: 1861
Medium: Albumen silver print
Culture: American
Department: Photographs
Institution: Getty Museum
Object ID: 850fe055-4b97-4754-b3ff-c1bf8fd0a82f

From the Getty Museum record

When Carleton Watkins photographed the remote Yosemite wilderness, America was not yet a century old. Conscious of their country's lack of a national cultural identity, Americans adopted particularly dramatic geologic formations such as Cathedral Spires as their version of ancient ruins and soaring Gothic churches. The great pine tree in the foreground here became another form of this uniquely American history. Watkins's images helped define America's preference for landscape views depicting rugged wilderness and celebrating spectacular landforms on the grandest of scales.

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