Experiencing the Yosemite Valley: Transformations in Visual Culture Through “The Best General View”
- ArtSurvey contact
- Aug 23, 2023
- 19 min read
Jonathan Hacker
Carleton Watkins, [Yosemite Valley from the Best General View], 1866. Albumen silver print, 16 1/8 × 20 9/16 in. 85.XM.11.3 The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Throughout the 1860s, photographs of Yosemite Valley became a prominent way for audiences to explore and experience the wonders of the region. However, three photographic images of the same scene in Yosemite—Charles Weed’s 1864 Yo-Semite Valley, from the Mariposa Trail, Carleton Watkins’s 1865-1866 The Yosemite Valley from the Best General View, and Watkins’s later stereoview by the same name—provide three remarkably different visual connections for the viewer. Through the examination and comparison of these three images, three different modes of agency emerge which ultimately express a change in how the contemporary viewer perceived ideas of American nationalism and expansionist thought within the western visual culture of the 1860s; First, through seeing others enjoy the landscape, Second, through personal observation and imagined possessiveness of the landscape, and Third, through the virtual experience of being there.
Between the summers of 1865 and 1866, Photographer Carleton E. Watkins (1829-1916) published a large 16 by 20-inch photograph of The Yosemite Valley from the Best General View.[i] The gold toned albumen silver print, that would become one of Watkins’s most recognized images, presents a striking view of the Yosemite Valley from an overlook on its southern end, along the Mariposa Trail. From its commanding vantage, Watkins allows the viewer to survey the geographical features populating the landscape of the valley as it stretches to the distant horizon. A delimbed pine tree in the foreground becomes our point of reference from which we can place Yosemite’s most distinguished landmarks; Half Dome (on the horizon just left of the pine tree), El Capitan (to the far left in the middle distance), Cathedral Rock (just opposite, behind the pine), and Bridal Veil Falls (just below Cathedral Rock).[ii] As simple as this image appears, its creation and reception among its contemporary audience reveals a striking link between its Euro-American audience and a sense of possessiveness when it comes to cultural attitudes of the American West.
Throughout the mid-to-late nineteenth century, photographs of the American West accompanied and promoted popular interest and exploration, creating a unique visual culture surrounding the region. Photographers such as William Henry Jackson, John Karl Hillers, and Timothy H. O’Sullivan routinely made a name for themselves by joining government funded expeditions to take pictures of often remote landscapes for the surveys’ popular scientific research. As a result, photography quickly became the central way Americans in the East were able to readily experience and appreciate the often-indescribable West. The role of such photographs, in context to these surveys, has been explored at length by many cultural art historians. Robin Kelsey’s 2015 book Archive Style: Photographs and illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850-1890, and more generally addressed by Richard Bartlett in his 1964 book Great Surveys of the American West, have explored the relationship between western regions and specific expedition photographers, such as; Jackson with Yellowstone, Hillers with the Grand Canyon, and O’Sullivan with the Snake River of Idaho. Yet it is important to note that it was not only through these government funded surveys that photographs of the West were produced and consumed. Many private photographers travelled to the West and set up their own galleries and studios, producing images that often rivaled those coming out of the Government funded surveys—notably for this discussion, the photographs by Carleton Watkins.
In the 1860s, Watkins’s images of the Yosemite Valley were used for survey publications by the Geological Survey of California, headed by Josiah Whitney and William Brewer, and thus were elevated to the same national attention as Jackson and O’Sullivan. However, a key distinction is that Watkins was never an official member of any expedition into Yosemite.[iii] As a result, Watkins’s partnership with Whitney was quite different from the associations of other photographers and their government funded surveys. While Jackson, Hillers, and O’Sullivan travelled with their survey parties and took carefully regimented photographs for the survey leaders, there seems to be no evidence of Watkins traveling into Yosemite with Whitney and Brewer for an extended period of time. This left Watkins free to explore and take photographs in Yosemite at his own leisure; both for the survey publications and for his own commercial use at his gallery in San Francisco. This loose association, however, has largely left Watkins out of the traditional discourse of survey photography.[iv] In Kelsey’s book on images for the U.S. Surveys, Watkins is only mentioned in passing. Yet perhaps due to this level of freedom that Watkins was afforded, images like The Yosemite Valley from the Best General View fall into this strange category of those created through private-public partnership. Through funds provided by the California Geological Society, Watkins was able to afford a larger camera capable of producing large glass negatives and more imposing finished photographs, as well as a more sophisticated lens that allowed for more detailed and visually stimulating images. Because of the very nature of survey photographers traveling with the Survey party, these larger and more sophisticated cameras proved too cumbersome to take with them.[v] Making the public funding of Watkins equipment and the private nature of his excursions into Yosemite, a perfect and unusual match. As a result, Watkins’s photographs stand out for their artistic merit, and more closely fall in line with Watkins’s own artistic vision and style as a private commercial photographer.
Prior to his time in Yosemite, and the surrounding region in the Mariposa Grove, Watkins was commissioned to photograph railroads, mines, and homesteads. Most significantly to the development of Watkin’s photographic style seems to have been his inclusion in the court case of United States v. Fossat in 1858, in which Watkins was hired to take photographs of the Guadalupe Quicksilver Mine in Santa Clara County in order to settle a land boundary dispute. The photograph taken was one that sought to, in Watkin’s words; “give the best view of El Encino”—the valley in which the mine in question was located.[vi] As noted by historian Tyler Green, this marked a turning point for the artist to position himself as a photographer specializing in capturing images of private property and industrial complexes.[vii] Essential to many interpretations of Watkins’s later photographs, this early period instilled on him the ideas of taking photographs—like those of the Guadalupe Quicksilver Mine—for the sake of displaying possession and ownership of the land from the best spot from which to survey it.
As Martin Berger points out in his 2003 article, Overexposed: Whiteness and the Landscape Photography of Carlton Watkins, Watkins’s title of The Yosemite Valley from the Best General View,“expresses the photographer’s obvious confidence in having reproduced the region for his patron from the most favorable vantage; as such it offers a self-conscious claim for the artist’s mastery of his photographic medium.”[viii] Based on Berger’s assertion, for Watkins to declare this as “the best general view” of the valley suggests that it was meant for an audience for whom photographs were the preferred—or only—way to appreciate Yosemite Valley. Further, this one photographic representation could encompass all that the viewer would need to see. This awareness suggests that, instead of trying to educate the viewer on the rock formations and the geographic wonders Yosemite has to offer, Watkins was instead presenting the most favorable spot in which to see them all in one panoramic vista. A vista that should be addressed within the context of Watkins’s background in providing an image with the overtones of possession and surveying one’s own property. Framing his images in this way, leads to a greater consideration of how Watkins’s Photographs became the most popular of Yosemite among its contemporary audience in the East.
Interestingly, as pointed out by the leader of the California Geological Society’s survey of Yosemite, Josiah Whitney in a letter to his partner William Brewer in 1866, Watkins’s image was not the first photograph capturing this general view of Yosemite Valley from this spot on the Mariposa trail. Approximately one year earlier in 1864, photographer Charles Leander Weed (1824-1903), the first photographer recorded to enter the Yosemite Valley, produced his image of Yo-Semite Valley, from the Mariposa Trail (Fig. 2); published in a portfolio of 30 large albumen prints of Yosemite Valley, Mariposa County, and the Big Trees, Calaveras County, California, by the publishing firm Lawrence & Houseworth of San Francisco.[ix] In Weed’s image we have the same pine tree to give us a point of reference; this time shown still with a lower limb that would break off before Watkins arrived. From here the same spatial composition as described earlier allows us to identify the main characteristics of Yosemite Valley; Half Dome, El Capitan, Cathedral Rock, and Bridal Veil Falls in their respective locations.
Charles L. Weed, Yo-Semite Valley, from the Mariposa Trail. Mariposa County, Cal., negative 1864. print 1864 - 1872, Albumen silver print, 15 5/8 × 20 5/16 in., 85.XP.15.5, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
While Watkins’s photograph is strikingly similar to Weed’s earlier version in almost all regards, Weed’s has been criticized for not carrying the same grandeur of the scene that Watkins was able to convey. The difference is largely due to a slight change in the photograph’s vantage point.[x] Weed’s image appears to have been taken from several yards further back from the edge of the overlook, creating additional space that allows the figure of a well-dressed man to rest comfortably against the pine tree as he looks out at the landscape in front of him. Upon closer examination, the presence of this figure has been described as inherently altering the viewers interpretation and experience of the landscape; just as figures do for many American landscape depictions from the time. As Barbara Novak notes, when discussing figures such as this in her influential 1980 book, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875; “figures, when present, demand to be ‘read’ in the light of contemporary nature attitudes. … [as] They are themselves insertions of culture into nature.” [xi] Indeed, as small as the figure is, relative to Weed’s overall composition, his presence does not go unnoticed. Undoubtably he stands out as the subject of the photograph, rather than the more interesting landmarks in the valley in front of him. But without any indication of who this man is, the subsequent interpretation of the photograph for us—and for its contemporary audience—becomes simply an image of an unknown Euro-American in Yosemite Valley. An interpretation that can be regarded as the contemporary fascination with the exploration of a wilderness untouched by Euro-Americans.
The pretext of exploration in Weed’s image evokes the idea that in order to experience the landscape presented in front of the figure, one must physically be there. Essentially, the materiality of this photograph, and Weed’s entire album of 30 prints, relies on the notions of travel and tourism in the nineteenth century. As Steven Hoelscher notes in his article The Photographic Construction of Tourist Space in Victorian America, this culture was shaped by images like this informing the viewer on what they should see, how it should be seen, and when to see it, “all in a matter-of-fact and seemingly ‘unmediated’ way.”[xii] In light of this, Weed’s photograph, with the figure serving as a stand-in for the viewer, could fundamentally be interpreted as a guide for how to see Yosemite by observing the view from this particular vantage point—just as this man is doing—assuming you have the means to do so.
When Watkins’s recreated Weed’s Yo-Semite Valley, from the Mariposa Trail, he strikingly altered this image; cropping the view to cut off the top of the pine tree, remove the additional space in the foreground, and omitting the figure from the scene entirely. By reframing the view in such a way, Watkins not only created a more aesthetically pleasing photograph of the landscape, but also transformed its focus from the figure back to the valley itself. As simple as this omission seems, the ramification for the viewer’s connection with the image is powerful. Essentially, if in Weed’s image we are looking at someone observing the landscape, then without that frame of reference Watkins inherently allows for the viewer to observe the Valley in front of them on their own.
The implication of this simple alteration gives Watkins’s later photograph a profound sense of agency that Weed’s does not possess. By reframing the viewer as the observer of the landscape, Watkins inherently evokes what Albert Boime refers to as the “magisterial gaze,” a theme common in American landscapes from the Hudson River and the Rocky Mountain Schools.[xiii] The idea of this gaze has been explored at length by Boime in The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny and American Landscape Painting, c. 1830-1865, and referenced by Barbara Novak, and later by Martin Berger in his 2005 book Sight Unseen; Whiteness and American Visual Culture as a “cultural paradigm revealing the ‘ideology of expansionist thought.’”[xiv] Essentially, this gaze of looking down on the landscape from a position where the viewer has the opportunity to marvel at the scenery before them, gives the viewer an inherent sense of possessiveness; as if the landscapes, and the experience of being there, were their own.[xv] This idea is exaggerated by Watkins employing a panoramic mode of creating the image, one that engages the viewer by giving them space to move through the valley and observe its natural features.
The visual position and role that Watkins gives the viewer allowed his contemporary audience to see themselves in place of the lens of the camera. A point of view that harkens back to Watkins creating an image that inherently allows the viewer to survey the land with that sense of ownership he used in his early commissions of private property. Indeed, Watkins even takes this a step further with his photographs of Yosemity Valley by removing figures and structures almost entirely form his views of the valley. Even the Native Americans who still lived and worked in the region throughout the late nineteenth-century are overlooked and omitted from most of Watkins’s Yosemite views, adding to that notion of the viewer observing their untouched wilderness. With the awareness of Watkins’s images becoming synonymous with the wilderness of Yosemite, and the underlying idea of this region being an integral part of American attitudes of the West belonging to Euro-Americans, interpretations and understandings of many of Watkins’s panoramic images of Yosemite should inherently be looked at through the late-nineteenth-century lens of whiteness and American nationalism. As discussed by Berger in 2005, this awareness produces an important understanding of how Watkins’s contemporary audience approached these images and the experience they evoked, especially in context with how they were presented.
Just as Weed’s photograph was commissioned and published as part of a portfolio of images to introduce and rouse the public to Yosemite, Watkins also published his images in a similar way. His first picture book on the region, Yo-semite Valley photographic views: falls and valley of Yo-semite in Mariposa County California, encompassing 51 large plates, each measuring 18 by 22-inches, creates a broad study of Yosemite Valley and its surrounding landscapes; with the Best General View being the second photograph the viewer encounters.[xvi] The image’s relationship with the valley is further enhanced by the addition of King and J.T. Gardner’s map of the region at the beginning of the book, for which the pictures serve to illustrate the maps topography point by point.[xvii] This addition serves those viewers who may have never actually visited Yosemite, as Alan Trachtenberg notes in his book Reading American Photographs, creating a strong association by “[making] the photographs a tangible part of the ‘conceptual bridge’ between a view and its representation as a name on a map.”[xviii] In this way, there is a striking difference between the materiality of Watkins’s and Weed’s photographs of the same scene as, within their original published contexts. While Weed shows the viewer how to observe the landscape, Watkins uses this connection between the map and his images to allow the viewer to follow a tour around the valley and observe it for themselves—a nineteenth century “choose your own adventure.”
Taking this sense of personal observation a step further, mere photographs were not always enough to fully immerse oneself in that personal experience of the West. By the late 1850s, stereoviews were becoming a popular form of looking at photographic images of the West. Predicated on the idea of two almost identical photographs printed side by side on a piece of cardstock—observed through an apparatus known as a stereoscope which visually merges the two pictures together to create a three-dimensional image—the stereoview elevated the viewers engagement with the scene, creating an entirely new visual experience. As cultural historian Robert J. Silverman points out in his essay The Stereoscope and Photographic Depictions in the 19th Century, “The Stereoscope occupied a curious cultural position during the second half of the 19th century,” one that allowed the viewer to immerse themselves in the images they saw.[xix] Although the stereoscope was not a relatively new development in the mid 1800s, it became more prevalent with the 1861 invention of a more compact handheld steroviewer (stereoscope) by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894).[xx] Holmes later wrote on the popularity of his invention that; "There was not any wholly new principle involved in its construction, but, it proved so much more convenient than any hand-instrument in use, that it gradually drove them all out of the field, in great measure..."[xxi] With this new handheld version, the public had greater access to these three-dimensional forms of photography; and through then, the West.
The broad reach of stereoviews, through mass production, meant that images of popular attractions could be easily disseminated to the public, while the immersive experience of such images meant that viewers could more deeply engage with its subjects. This newly popularized medium particularly lent itself to the panoptic views of the expansive West. As Martha Sandweiss notes in her 2002 book Print the Legend: Photography and the American West, a stereographic image works “most dramatically when it contains objects arranged in receding visual planes.”[xxii] This awareness was not lost on photographers of Yosemite, like Carleton Watkins. In addition to using new technologies of glass plate negatives, larger cameras and better lenses, to create his large-scale photographs like The Yosemite Valley from the Best General View, he also took with him a small stereographic camera in order to capture what he thought were some of those most interesting scenes with this virtual three-dimensional medium. One such stereographic image being The Yosemite Valley, from "Best General View” (Fig. 3) published in the mid-1860s.
Carleton Watkins, The Yosemite Valley, from "Best General View.", about 1867, Albumen silver print 84.XC.979.9301 The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Weston J. and Mary M. Naef
Once again, in this stereoview Watkins provides the same vantage point from the overlook on the Mariposa Trail, with the same pine tree in the foreground and the same spatial organization of the natural monuments in the valley below. The scene, however, is cropped even more than Watkins’s earlier photograph. By eliminating roughly two visual inches from either side of his earlier composition, removing the panoramic idea of the scene, Watkins focused solely on the heart of the valley. But whatever loss in the panoramic ideal that this elimination might have caused is made up for, and perhaps even surpassed, by the finished illusion of the stereoview. As noted by Sandweiss; “If panoramas convey a sense of realism through motion and dramatic lighting effects, the stereos acquired their illusion of realism through their seemingly three-dimensionality.”[xxiii] Indeed, when viewed through the stereoscope, the dramatic sensation of the valley receding away from the viewer becomes even more evident than Watkins’s or Weed’s earlier photographs might have suggested. Additionaly, with the popularity of Watkins’s stereoviews, such as this image from The Best General View might suggest, this three-dimensionality created a strong sensation in the viewer of actually being there on the edge of the overlook, looking down at the valley itself. As a result, the use of this stereoview gave the viewer the opportunity to not only observe but also experience the landscape, as if they are actually there, in a way that Watkins’s and Weed’s earlier photographs do not allow. With such a phenomenon, an experiential aesthetic emerges that elevates the link between these images and the viewer to even new levels of possessiveness and inherent imagined ownership.
One of the aspects not fully explored or discussed with images and stereoviews of the West, that becomes prominent in those by Watkins, is the experience of ownership that they not only allow the viewer to enjoy, but ultimately seem to encourage. With the materiality of these images, there is much more viewer participation created with Watkins’s book and stereoviews, which adds to the inherent experience of the viewer. Not only could one choose which scene to look at, but the act of placing that chosen stereoview into the apparatus and manually adjusting the stereoscope until the image comes into focus, suggests the viewer would be more invested in the scene and therefore more invested in the experience it provided. With regard to the visual culture of the 1860s, stereoviews like Watkins’s The Yosemite Valley, from "Best General View”provided contemporary Euro-American audiences with an experience second only to physically being there. The act of changing steroviews and bringing them into focus replicated the act of moving from one location to another, while the inherent three-dimensionality captivated and awed its audiences with the grandeur of the scenes that many would likely never see in person. If Watkins’s earlier image was simply a photograph of a landscape perceived to be owned by Euro-Americans, then this new method of experiencing the view allowed audiences in the East to experience that ownership—even if it was an illusion.
It is with this understanding of Watkins’s photographs and stereoviews of Yosemite Valley, that we can explore that experiential aesthetic in the late nineteenth-century as it relates to images and attitudes of the West in general. The notion of the magisterial gaze in Watkins photograph being amplified by the experiences provided through his later stereoview, gives these two images of the same scene a remarkably different outlook. In creating an ever-increasing personal connection with the Yosemite, Watkins’s earlier image of The Yosemite Valley from the Best General View follows the conventions of general ownership, while the understanding from the experience provided through the stereoview emphasizes that notion for the contemporary Euro-American viewer. The familiarity provided to the contemporary viewer of observing the landscape, and further experiencing and immersing themselves in it, corresponds to notions of ownership, possession, and even to the older ideas of colonization (a connection which can be explored at length with further research).
By the end of the 1860s, the overwhelming amount of materials and photographs of Yosemite that permeated the visual culture of the United States—by Weed, Watkins, and later by other photographers such as Edward Muybridge, Gustavus Fagersteen, and William Henry Jackson—allowed for multiple ways of observing and experiencing the landscape even without physically being there. However, these earliest photographic images of the same scene in Yosemite Valley—Charles Weed’s 1864 Yo-Semite Valley, from the Mariposa Trail, Carleton Watkins’s 1865-1866 The Yosemite Valley from the Best General View, and Watkins’s later The Yosemite Valley, from "Best General View”—provide evidence for three remarkably different stages in the visual experiences for the viewer that illustrate the rather quick progression of the visual culture of the American West in allowing contemporary viewers to engage with Yosemite Valley and the ideas of American nationalism and expansionist thought.
While all three of these photographic representations have been explored individually by various scholars, examining them in context with each other allows us to explore their broader relationships with how their audiences understood and used them as tools to visit, expand, and culturally assimilate the American West. Learning how to observe the landscape through photographs like Weed’s, becoming the observer of the landscape through panoramic images like Watkins’s, and being able to experience the landscape through the material apparatus of his later stereoviews. All three modes of understanding and interpretation nodding to the significance of 1860s visual culture in the American experience of the Yosemite Valley as a symbol for the broader American West.
[i] The exact year this photograph was taken is debated between 1865 and 1866. [ii] As spatially described in Martin A. Berger, “Overexposed: Whiteness and the Landscape Photography of Carlton Watkins,” Oxford Art Journal 26, no. 1 (2003), 5-6. [iii] Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 135. [iv] In William Truettner’s exhibition catalogue of “The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier,” images by—and the role of—Watkins are not discussed or incorporated beyond his loose association with other artists, such as Albert Bierstadt and his paintings of the Redwood trees of California. Given the scope of the exhibition this omission is understandable, but interesting none the less. [v] Not only cumbersome but dangerous as well. there are reports of one of the photographers working with Jackson in Yosemite, losing his photographic negatives and camera after it fell off the side of a cliff in the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Adding for the need to use smaller and more manageable equipment. [vi] Tyler Green, Carleton Watkins: Making the West American (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 37. [vii] Tyler Green, Carleton Watkins: Making the West American (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 37-80. [viii] Martin A. Berger, “Overexposed: Whiteness and the Landscape Photography of Carlton Watkins,” Oxford Art Journal 26, no. 1 (2003), 4. [ix] The size and scope of this image, and indeed the entire portfolio of mammoth-plate photographs from all over the valley, would have been a daring undertaking by Weed, and Lawrence & Houseworth, and is certainly is one that Watkins would have been aware of as one of San Francisco’s most successful commercial photographers. [x] James N. Wood and Weston J. Naef, ERA of Exploration: The Rise of Landscape Photography in the American West, 1860-1885 (Albright-Knox Art Gallery/Metropolitan Museum, 1975), 36. [xi] Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 167. [xii] Steven Hoelscher, “The Photographic Construction of Tourist Space in Victorian America,” Geographical Review 88, no. 4 (1998), 549. [xiii] Alan Wallach, “Making a picture of the View From Mount Holyoke” in American Iconology ed. David C. Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 89-90. [xiv] Albert Boime, The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny and American Landscape Painting, c. 1830-1865 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 21, 1, as discussed in Martin Berger,Sight Unseen; Whiteness and American Visual Culture, (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California; 2005), 76. [xv] Martin Berger, Sight Unseen; Whiteness and American Visual Culture, (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California; 2005), 75-76 [xvi] Carleton E. Watkins. Yo-semite Valley Photographic Views: Falls and Valley of Yo-semite in Mariposa County California. (San Francisco: [publisher not identified]), https://dpul.princeton.edu/wa/catalog/ws859k60g. Published in 1863 according to its title page, a date that poses an interesting paradox when it comes to the dates that Watkins’s and Weed’s images were taken, which we have yet seemed to be resolved. [xvii] Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 138. [xviii] Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 135. [xix] Robert J. Silverman, “The Stereoscope and Photographic Depiction in the 19th Century,” Technology and Culture 34, no. 4 (1993), 730. [xx] Eleanor M. Tilton, Amiable Autocrat: A Biography of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, (New York: H. Schuman, 1947), 425. [xxi] Oliver Wendell Holmes, "The American Stereoscope," Image: Journal of Photography of the George Eastman House 1, no. 3 (1952), 1. Reprinted from The Philadelphia Photographer, 1869. [xxii] Martha Sandweiss, “A Stereoscopic View of the American West,” The Princeton University Library Chronicle 67, no. 2 (2006), 275. [xxiii] Martha Sandweiss, Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 140.
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