Carleton Watkins: Yosemite on Mammoth Glass, Then Ruin in the 1906 Fire

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Carleton Watkins was born in Oneonta, New York, in 1829 and went west in 1851 with his friend Collis Huntington, who became one of the Central Pacific's Big Four while Watkins failed at gold mining. Working as a clerk at George Murray's bookstore in San Francisco, he was asked to mind the neighboring studio of daguerreotypist Robert Vance and turned out portraits good enough to launch a career. By 1858 he ran his own business, shooting stereo views for a court case over the New Almaden mercury mine. In July 1861 he hauled a mammoth plate camera into Yosemite, coating 18 by 22 inch glass plates with wet collodion and developing each within minutes in a dark tent, and returned with 30 mammoth plates and 100 stereo negatives.

Shown at the Goupil Gallery in New York in 1862, the images circulated in Congress through Senator John Conness and are credited with influencing Abraham Lincoln to sign the 1864 Yosemite Grant. Watkins opened the Yosemite Art Gallery in 1867, but debt let creditor J.J. Cook seize his negatives, and Isaiah Taber sold the prints under his own name, legally, since photographs had no copyright protection. Watkins reshot a New Series, married Frances Sneed in 1879, and then lost his eyesight. His family lived in an abandoned railroad car for 18 months, the 1906 earthquake fire destroyed his Market Street studio, and he died in 1916 at the Napa State Hospital.

• Collodion, the coating on his plates, was a mixture of gun cotton and ether.
• His Yosemite work won a medal at the Universal Exposition in Paris.
• He named his son Collis after his old friend Huntington.
• While he was hospitalized, his wife began calling herself a widow, and he was buried in an unmarked grave.
• His photograph of the Grizzly Giant sequoia drew tourists whose roads and hotels damaged the trees he hoped to protect.