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Yosemite Slideshow
Carleton Watkins’ 19th-Century Photographs of Yosemite Valley (03:19)
Produced and Narrated by: Brendan McCabe. Text by Bruce Hathaway.
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Comments (2)
After reading The Mountains of California, Carleton Watkins’ photographs of Yosemite in the nineteenth century really helped me see the landscape as Muir would have seen it. Although I have been to Yosemite National Park, and much of the park still looks as it did when Watkins took his photographs, I really like being able to see the landscape exactly as Muir did. In a passage of The Mountains of California, Muir meets a pair of artists and guides them to an area where they can see a view that they would consider worth painting. The artists remark that all the scenery in the Yosemite Valley is beautiful, but that they are looking for a large vista to paint. I thought it was interesting, then, that most of Watkins’ photographs were of large, sweeping landscapes, which really captured the huge scale of the cliffs and valleys in Yosemite. Later photographers, like Ansel Adams, would take close-up photographs of leaves or flowers or rippling water, so I found it particularly fascinating to see the historical styles of photography that has focused on Yosemite.
Posted by Kate on August 24,2011 | 08:21 PM
Marvelous photos. ran into a reference to these in Genius of Place, The Life of Fredrick Law Olmsted, Justin Martin author. recommend this book highly. JRW
Posted by James R Williams on July 29,2011 | 02:49 PM