Carleton E. Watkins

 Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829-1916) captured the grand depictions of an American paradise in his photographs of Yosemite Valley in California. Arguably the world’s first renowned landscape photographer, Watkins made his first photographs there in 1861—large sized prints made with an 18-by-22-inch mammoth plate camera, well suited to the grandeur of the land.

Included were the three contiguous photographs that make up his extraordinarily detailed View from the Sentinel Dome (1865-66).

The exhibition balanced the early work of landscape photographers with the twentieth century focus on the failure of the West’s promised bounty.

Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829–1916) Mount Starr King and Glacier Point, Yosemite, No. 69, 1865–66 Photograph, mammoth albumen print from wet collodion negative Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow Fund Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston