[Rudyard (English) Reservoir. Central Dam 114 feet high; Timber Crib and Stone Filling]

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[Rudyard (English) Reservoir. Central Dam 114 feet high; Timber Crib and Stone Filling]

Creator

Carleton Watkins

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
about 1871
Medium
Albumen silver print
Culture
American
Department
Photographs
Institution
Getty Museum

Barely visible behind the log-and-gravel dam, an impressive structure that blends with the landscape because of the use of natural materials, the glassy lake reflects the standing trees. A tiny figure atop the dam just to the right of center indicates its scale, while the breadth and clarity of Carleton Watkins's view encompasses both the tree-pocked mountaintops and the falls bursting through the dam break at the frame's lower right center edge. The photograph divides neatly into layers defined by shifts in tones, giving the vertical and horizontal lines of tree trunks the overall appearance of striated rock. This image is part of a series that Watkins made of North Bloomfield, Nevada, gravel mines.

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