Yosemite on glass

A ton of glass, and a valley

Carleton Watkins photographed Yosemite with a mammoth-plate camera, glass negatives around eighteen by twenty-two inches, the whole outfit hauled by mule. The valley pictures from about 1865 have a stillness that comes from that technology. A plate that size wants a long look and a steady camera. El Capitan, the river, the meadows: he framed them the way a person frames a claim, so a stranger in a city would understand the size. The shop's valley view is one of those plates. The Merced River view is the other, water in the foreground, cliffs repeating themselves upstream.

In 1864 Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant, turning the valley and the Mariposa Grove over to California as a place to be preserved. It was the first time the federal government set land aside that way, a step on the road to the national parks. Watkins's big prints were part of how people in the East came to believe the valley was worth it. A photograph you could almost walk into did a kind of lobbying. The grant is the law. The plates are the argument that preceded the habit of parks.

What the earthquake took

Fame did not keep the negatives safe. Watkins lost his business in a bank panic. In 1906 the San Francisco earthquake and the fire that followed destroyed most of the life's work stored in the city. What survives of the mammoth plates survives because prints had already gone out into the world, into albums and collections that were somewhere else that week. The Merced picture is one of those survivors. Looking at it is looking at a print that outlived the glass.

That fact changes the hang. These are copies of a view whose original negative is likely gone. The valley is still there. The particular sheet of glass Watkins exposed is not. A public-domain print, made from what remains, is how the picture continues. Credit him, date it about 1865, and let the size of the original plate be part of the story you tell when someone asks why the detail holds up.

A government Adams, and a geyser

Most Ansel Adams photographs are not in the public domain. The Tetons and the Snake River is an exception with a paper trail. In 1941 and 1942 the Department of the Interior hired Adams to photograph parks and monuments for a mural project in the Interior building. The war stopped the murals. The negatives, made as government work, ended up at the National Archives, and the pictures are public. The 1942 Snake River view, the river bending through the foreground and the Tetons behind it, is the one the shop can print for that reason. A copy of it also flew on the Voyager golden record, among the images chosen to describe Earth. The photograph had started as a mural that was never installed, and it left the solar system anyway.

Old Faithful, a Detroit Publishing photochrom from about 1904, is the popular park between Watkins's grant and Adams's commission. By 1904 Yellowstone had been a national park for a generation, and the geyser was already the picture a tourist expected. Detroit's color process, described in the photochrom story, turns the steam and the basin into a parlor print. Set it between the glass-plate valley and the 1942 river and you have three eras of pointing a camera at western water: a wet-plate mule train, a color lithograph for the tourist trade, and a federal job that happened to be Adams.

Four pictures. Watkins's valley. Watkins's river, the one the fire did not erase. Adams's Tetons, public because the Interior Department paid for the trip. Old Faithful, about 1904, for the crowd those earlier pictures helped invent. The sources are the plate, the Archives, and the Detroit file. The valley did the rest.