Getty Museum
Dams and Lake, Nevada County, California, Distant View
Creator
Carleton WatkinsAmerican Photographer · 1829–1916
All works by this person →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,
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- about 1871
- Medium
- Albumen silver print
- Culture
- American
- Department
- Photographs
- Institution
- Getty Museum
As in many of Carleton Watkins's landscape photographs, a large, bold foreground element and a delicately atmospheric background distinguish this image of the English Dam. One of the earliest civil engineering feats on the West Coast, the dam consisted of a 114-foot-tall reservoir constructed from a network of interlocking timber boxes filled with stones. As water filled the area enclosed by the dam, the trees were flooded, leaving white skeletal trunks projecting from the newly formed lake. While documenting the effect of humankind on nature, Watkins's photograph also conveys a spare and unusual beauty with which he seemed to particularly identify.
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