Carleton E. Watkins

In the 1860s, Carleton E. Watkins made his living by selling landscape photographs in his Yo-Semite Gallery in San Francisco. For over twenty years the artist used Yosemite Valley as a laboratory in which he could experiment with photographic styles and techniques.  His earlier albumen prints awed the public with views of dizzying heights and bird’s-eye perspectives. By the 1880s Watkins had distinguished himself from his contemporaries by consciously capturing abstract forms in the landscape. In this sense, Watkins’s albumen prints foreshadowed the modernist aesthetic that would emerge in photography in the next century.