Big River, from the Rancherie, Mendocino, California

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Artist: Carleton Watkins (American, 1829–1916)
Medium: Albumen print
Size: 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.)
Museum: Art Institute of Chicago
Rights: CC0 — no rights reserved

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 majestic. Depicted with equal clarity is the river, which winds into the receding hills. This technical and aesthetic perfection was all the more remarkable considering the difficulty of the wet-plate process for a frontier photographer. In the field, Watkins had to transport (with the aid of several pack mules) mammoth cameras, dark tents, chemicals, and as many as four hundred glass plates.

He also had to contend with constant packing and unpacking, the lack of pure water, and the tendency of dust to adhere to the sticky collodion. Photographs such as Big River and Watkins’s famous views of Yosemite (which helped persuade the US Congress to pass legislation protecting the valley’s wilderness) provided the world with some of the first glimpses of the American West.

Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0.