Giant sequoia, Mariposa Grove

Yosemite National Park

albumine print on cardboard

annotated in pencil on mount verso

Carleton Watkins was the consummate photographer of the American West. Born in Oneonta, New York, he moved to California in 1849, taught himself the new medium of photography, and established his reputation in 1861 with an astonishing series of views of Yosemite Valley. It was partly due to the artistry and rugged beauty of these photographs that President Lincoln signed a bill on June 30, 1864, declaring the valley inviolate and initiating the blueprint for the nation's National Park System. In the middle of the brutal Civil War and its destruction of man and land, Lincoln saw the preservation of a small but extraordinary piece of America's wilderness as a progressive goal to share with the republic.
Watkins was a virtuoso practitioner of the difficult wet-collodion process, and the remarkable clarity of his "mammoth" prints (18 by 22 inches) was unmatched. He rendered with exquisite finesse the vastness and grandeur of Yosemite's glacial valleys, dramatic waterfalls, massive rock faces, and majestic trees. Watkins produced this work wrangling a dozen or more mules carrying roughly two thousand pounds of equipment, including his oversize camera, large glass plates, and flammable chemicals. It is in itself a miracle that any photographs survived these travails.
(The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

Der Riesenmammutbaum (Sequoiadendron giganteum) ist ein immergrüner Baum, der Wuchshöhen von bis zu 95 Meter und einen Stammumfang von über 34 Meter an der sehr weit ausladenden Basis erreichen kann. Bei den größten Exemplaren kann der Stammdurchmesser sogar über 10 Meter betragen. Das Zypressengewächs ist an den Westhängen der Sierra Nevada in Kalifornien beheimatet.