Carleton E. Watkins

Carleton E. Watkins American, 1829-1916 Born in Oneonta, New York, Carleton Watkins traveled west to California in the early 1850s, shortly after the gold rush. He learned photography in 1854 from Robert Vance, one of the earliest and best of San Francisco's daguerreotypists. Vance's landscape photography, unusually skilled for the time, may have influenced Watkins's work. Watkins was among the first photographers in the Yosemite valley, shooting there in 1861, and his mammoth-plate landscape photographs of the area are believed to have contributed to Yosemite's early designation as a...