Big River, from the Rancherie, Mendocino, California
1863
Medium
Albumen print
Dimensions
40 × 52.5 cm (15 3/4 × 20 11/16 in.); Mount: 55 × 68.4 cm (21 11/16 × 26 15/16 in.); Image/paper: 40.1 × 52.6 cm (15 3/4 × 20 11/16 in.)
Classification
albumen silver print
Department
Photography and Media
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
63554
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
Like the vast and untapped landscape of the American West, Carleton Watkins’s photographic images are grand in spirit and in size. Using a giant wet-plate camera whose thick glass negatives—coated with a sensitized emulsion called collodion and exposed while still wet—were often as large as the average easel painting of the time, Watkins here fused a sense of the picturesque with a Romantic expression of nature’s timelessness, immensity, and silence. The trees are sharply defined, still, and maj...
About the Artist
Carleton Watkins · 1829–1916
Carleton Watkins (1829–1916) was an American photographer whose majestic landscape photographs of the American West, particularly of Yosemite Valley, rank among the most important images in the history of photography. Born in Oneonta, New York, he moved to California during the Gold Rush era and learned photography in San Francisco in the late 1850s. In 1861, Watkins made his first trip to Yosemi...