Description
Carleton E. Watkins was a 19th century
photographer based in San Francisco who made his name documenting the rapid growth of the
American West, and whose name is frequently associated with the birth of the photographic
medium – particularly with early landscape photography. This collection contains albumen
prints taken throughout his career, between the years of 1856 and 1885. The bulk of
photographs taken depict the Yosemite Valley and MariposaS Grove, and were taken at various
points between 1861 and 1881. It includes large-format mammoth plate photographs and smaller
photographic prints, as well as more commercial formats such as stereographs, cabinet cards,
and boudoir cards. The photographs depict a variety of subjects, from San Francisco to
various locations around the Western United States, as well as images of prominent visitors
to San Francisco, and photographs of the homes of some of Watkins's wealthy patrons, among
them bankers, railroad magnates, and politicians.
Background
Carleton E. Watkins was a 19th century photographer based in San Francisco who made his
name documenting the rapid growth of the American West. His majestic photos of the Yosemite
Valley, in Mariposa County, California, are said to have influenced Abraham Lincoln's 1864
Yosemite Land Grant - the first act of Congress to designate federal land for public use. It
is often referred to as "the birth of the national parks system." Watkins was the oldest of
eight children, born to a carpenter and an innkeeper in Oneonta, New York, on November 11,
1829. He moved west with childhood friend Collis Huntington during the Gold Rush in 1851. He
later took a job in San Francisco working next door to daguerreotypist Robert H. Vance, who
eventually hired Watkins and taught him the basics of photography. Watkins probably began
his photography career next year, in 1855, when he photographed the mines at New Idrea and
New Almaden, as well as Mission Santa Clara. Watkins first appeared in the San Francisco
directory in 1861, listed as a daguerrean operator at 425 Montgomery Street. It was also the
year that he first travelled to Yosemite to photograph it – a difficult undertaking that
required nearly two thousand pounds of equipment, including at least a dozen mules,
flammable chemicals, a stereoscopic camera, an oversize mammoth-plate camera, and 18 x 22
inch glass plates. On the strength of this work, Watkins was hired by the California State
Geological Survey from 1865-1866 to further document the Yosemite region. These photographs
of Yosemite (which exposed many Easterners to previously-unseen parts of the West) made
Watkins famous, and in 1867 he opened his lavish Yo Semite Art Gallery in San Francisco. He
also travelled to the Pacific Northwest, photographing Oregon, British Columbia, and the
Columbia River – the first photographs ever taken of the region. Despite his remarkable
success as a photographer and his many wealthy patrons, Watkins was a poor businessman and,
following the financial panic of 1873, lost his gallery, as well as his photographic
negatives, to J.J. Cook, Isaiah W. Taber, and Thomas H. Boyd. Taber then began issuing
prints of Watkins images with his name attached and without credit to Watkins. Watkins's
"New Series" of photographs were created to replace some of the images he lost. In 1876,
Watkins travelled to Virginia City, Nevada to visit the Comstock Lode, and it is here that
he is rumored to have met his future wife, Frances Sneed, who first became his assistant. In
1879, on his 50th birthday, Watkins married Sneed, who was 22 at the time. They had two
children, named Julia and Collis. In 1894, Watkins began to experience health problems, and
was unable complete a photographic commission. He also began to experience vision loss, and
by 1903 was almost completely blind. In 1906, while in the process of negotiating the sale
and transfer of his photographic archive (including his mammoth glass plate negatives) to
Stanford University, the 1906 earthquake, and subsequent fire, struck. Watkins's studio was
lost. When his poor health made it difficult for his family to care for him, he was placed
in the Napa State Hospital for the Insane. Of Watkins's death, on June 23, 1916, Peter
Palmquist writes: "He is thought to have been buried in the hospital graveyard, but no
tombstone marks his grave."