"Carleton Watkins: Picturing Yosemite" historian Tyler Green in a livestream presentation

Article by Roberta Werdinger

It details the fascinating and little-known history of how photography brought awareness to the American public of both the horrors of the Civil War and the splendors of Yosemite; how a coterie of activists and thinkers from the American Northeast brought their culture to the new state of California and changed the course of its politics; and how this new thinking, along with seismic shifts in social, artistic and environmental awareness culminated in President Abraham Lincoln’s signing of a bill that preserved Yosemite as what we now call a national park in 1864.

Carleton Watkins (1829-1916) is considered by many to be the greatest photographer of the 19th century–yet his origins are modest, and it took him a while to find and flourish in his medium. Born and raised on a farm in the Catskill Mountains of New York State and educated in a schoolhouse built by his father, he soon made his way, like many other eager young men of his time, to the San Francisco area during the Gold Rush. After drifting about for a while, he stumbled upon some luck in the form of an assignment to photograph the gold mining estates of an influential San Francisco couple, Jessie and John Frémont. Soon he found himself invited to their gatherings, which Green calls “the most favored intellectual salon west of St. Louis.” It is no overstatement to say that the events that happened as a result of the Frémonts’ gatherings changed the course of American, and certainly Californian, history.

Jessie Frémont, to start with, was (in Green’s words) “a diehard abolitionist Unionist Republican.” She was joined by political figures such as Edward Dickinson Baker, a friend of Lincoln’s from Illinois who came West to form a Republican presence in California and became a Senator in California’s then-satellite state of Oregon. (It’s important to note that in the Civil War era, the Democratic Party was the stronghold of the Southern power structure, built to enhance and preserve slavery, while the Republican Party, spearheaded by Abraham Lincoln, was the more progressive party centered in Northern interests, and was strongly anti-slavery.) Baker inspired people to join the Union cause and contribute to American culture and overall ideas. Political currents in California were running more toward a Democratic, secessionist tendency–not to join the Confederacy, but to create its own Pacific state. Yet in the 1860 election, California voted to affirm Lincoln by 700 votes out of 140,000–a slim margin even in those days.

Added to this potent political mix were people poised to change how America thought, told stories, made art, and worshiped. Most prominent of all in a list that included the iconic American authors Herman Melville and Mark Twain was Ralph Waldo Emerson, a poet, philosopher, and former Unitarian minister based outside Boston. Emerson spearheaded a New England-based movement known as Transcendentalism, which directly influenced many of the 19th century’s greatest writers, painters, and thinkers–including, as we shall see, those participating in the relatively new art of photography. Transcendentalism taught people that they could experience the sublime in themselves; it taught them that human nature could be noble, not craven. This sublime aspect dwelt everywhere, not just in some imagined heaven that was reserved for virtuous people as a reward for their earthly toils. Emerson’s ideas were expressed in his 1836 essay Nature, still read and discussed today along with the words of his friend Henry David Thoreau, who wrote Walden.

Among Emerson’s many proteges was Thomas Starr King, a young Unitarian minister, another diehard Unionist who came West to inspire Californians to the cause. A lover of art and nature, Starr King encouraged Watkins to visit and photograph Yosemite, in order to document its beauty in a manner consistent with the Northeast landscape painting tradition. Although Watkins would go on to photograph many other iconic landscapes in other Western states, his decision to photograph Yosemite would define an epoch.

In this era where people can drive up to an overlook in their convertible and snap an endless amount of pictures with their smartphones (well-documented, by the way, by Jonas Kulikauskas in the Museum’s current online exhibit, Yosemite People), it is hard to imagine the world of mid-19th-century photographers. Watkins designed the largest known outdoor camera in the world in order to carry out his task–one that Green describes as “about the size of a medium-sized refrigerator.” He had to lug this equipment, weighing in at 120 pounds, to some precarious locations. He then had to leave the camera shutter open for several minutes while the picture was taken, meaning that no people could pass in front of it, or pose in the frame, without ruining the image. This helped create the illusion of an empty landscape devoid of people and there for the taking.

Watkins visited and photographed Yosemite Valley and nearby Mariposa Grove in 1861, the beginning of the Civil War, and exhibited his prints in New York the next year. At the same time, Matthew Brady was exhibiting graphic photos of devastating battlefields such as Antietam–battles which the Union, at this early stage, often lost. From different sides of America, images of the sublime and of dire suffering filled American eyes and changed their thinking about death, life, human nature, and the nature of the universe they inhabited.

Watkins’s photos were more than pretty tourist pictures. They helped shift an entire country and region. While President Lincoln is mainly known for preserving the Union during the Civil War and for his Emancipation Proclamation, he also signed into being the preservation of the Yosemite Valley as a national park, which Green calls “the first such act of landscape preservation in the world.” He made it a national park during a time when the nation itself was in great peril.

Green, producer and host of the nationally acclaimed The Modern Art Notes Podcast, writes books about the manifold ways in which artists influence disciplines outside their own. As such, his work cautions against making an easy schematic of the North as a force for good while overcoming a South enmeshed in evil. Hailing from Northern California himself and now living in Asheville, North Carolina, Green believes that “Californians –myself included– have to be taught the revisionist history of the state.” He inquires into “how fundamental the California genocide [of Native peoples] was to the creation of the national parks,” pointing out that the state allowed for the enslavement of young Native people even while it entered the Union as a free state in 1850. Facing these facts, while painful, fosters awareness and can create communities of concern that address crucial current issues. Thus the scholarship of Green and others like him is an important part of our current national reckoning.

Green’s book on which his presentation is based, Carleton Watkins: Making the West American, published by Univ. of California Press, has received critical accolades and a Gold Medal at the 2019 California Book Awards. It is available in paperback at the Mendocino Book Company, which is partnering with the Museum for this presentation.

To access Green’s presentation on March 25 at 6 p.m., go to https://global.gotomeeting.com/join/162049109 or visit the Grace Hudson Museum website at www.gracehudsonmuseum.org, and scroll down to the event announcement with accompanying link.

Visitors to the Museum website can still take a virtual tour of Yosemite People, a collection of photos by Jonas Kulikauskas of the people who populate the contemporary Yosemite scene, until April 11.