Environmental Movement Media

Yosemite Valley

The fundamental role of landscape photography in the creation of Yosemite as the world's first wilderness area created “for the benefit of the people, for their resort and recreation, to hold them inalienable for all time” (Yosemite Grant, 1864) points to the crucial role of images in environmental politics and confirms that such image politics did not start with the advent of television. Survey photographer and Yosemite's first major documentarian Carlton Watkins embodied the multiple discourses of his time—romantic and artistic, to be sure, but also commercial, industrial, and technological. This is reflected in the breadth of his subjects, from the wilderness landscapes of Yosemite to the industrial mining at Mariposa. Watkins established dual legacies as both founder of landscape photography and chronicler of industrial progress, celebrator of sublime nature and creator of the technological sublime.

Watkins's early photos of Yosemite highlight, more than anything else, the sublime. Watkins's photography transforms the spectacular sublime into the domestic spectacle, the private possession of tourists, East Coast urban dwellers, and armchair adventurers. Yosemite is captured. It is at the mercy of the viewers. Viewers can contemplate the image at their leisure, put it away, return to it later, compare it to other collected images, and, indeed, own it, so that sublime nature is now commodified nature, a private possession, nature as cultural capital. The sublime is further domesticated within the photographs themselves as Watkins often created a safe space for the spectator—the beautiful place—from which to view the sublime spectacle. This dynamic, at work in many of the photographs, is particularly evident in the photograph “Yosemite Falls.”

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