"87. The Vernal Falls, 343 feet, Yosemite, Cal."

albumen print mounted on cardboard

title and printer ("Taber Photo, San Francisco") imprinted

Carleton Watkins was the consummate photographer of the American West. Born in Oneonta, New York, he moved to California in 1849, taught himself the new medium of photography, and established his reputation in 1861 with an astonishing series of views of Yosemite Valley. It was partly due to the artistry and rugged beauty of these photographs that President Lincoln signed a bill on June 30, 1864, declaring the valley inviolate and initiating the blueprint for the nation's National Park System. In the middle of the brutal Civil War and its destruction of man and land, Lincoln saw the preservation of a small but extraordinary piece of America's wilderness as a progressive goal to share with the republic.
Watkins was a virtuoso practitioner of the difficult wet-collodion process, and the remarkable clarity of his "mammoth" prints (18 by 22 inches) was unmatched. He rendered with exquisite finesse the vastness and grandeur of Yosemite's glacial valleys, dramatic waterfalls, massive rock faces, and majestic trees. Watkins produced this work wrangling a dozen or more mules carrying roughly two thousand pounds of equipment, including his oversize camera, large glass plates, and flammable chemicals. It is in itself a miracle that any photographs survived these travails.
(The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

Together with the creditor John G. Cook, Isaiah Taber took over Carleton E. Watkins' negatives and gallery in the 1870s when Watkins went bankrupt. This print is from a negative by Carleton Watkins made in 1861; the print was made 1875–1881 by Taber. Later in 1906 Taber himself lost his gallery and negatives, which included 80 tons of portrait negatives and 20 tons of view negatives, in the devastating fire which followed the San Francisco earthquake.
(Bassenge)

A popular subject in Yosemite, also photographed by Ansel Adams. The movement of the water is blurred due to the long exposure. Later, legions of photographers used long exposures as „creative“, stylistic device in order to achieve superficial effects, even though there was no technical necessity. In Watkins works this effect is created automatically and is therefore linked to the time and the point of origin.
(Fritz Simak)