Carleton E. Watkins 1829-1916

mammoth-plate albumen print, mounted, the photographer’s letterpress label, with the title, series number 828, series title, and his ‘427 Montgomery Street, San Francisco’ studio address, affixed to the mount, the collector’s stamp on the reverse, matted, framed, the Monterey Museum of Art exhibition label on the reverse, 1878-81

The Old Book Store, San Francisco, 1967

Focus Gallery, San Francisco, Early Views of Yosemite and the California Missions: Photographs by Carleton E. Watkins from the Collection of Gordon Bennett, November – December 1973

Monterey Museum of Art, Carleton E. Watkins: Yosemite Photographs, Courtesy of Gordon L. Bennett, June – September 1993

In his 1861 view of this massive rock formation, Watkins also used the Indian name, Tutocanula.  Browning discusses differing interpretations of this Indian word, among them one referring to ‘a Sandhill Crane, a chief of the First People’; and a Spanish translation, El Capitan, meaning ‘the Rock Chief’ (op. cit., p. 38).

Watkins’s ‘Old Series’ mammoth-plate of the same scene was made from close to the same spot.  But in a photograph made circa 1865-66, and in the ‘New Series’ photograph offered here, the camera’s view is more encompassing, and the frame includes not only the sand bar at the bottom of the photograph, but also a significant amount of sky above El Capitan at the top.  The sand bar’s old trees in the earlier view, which obscure the lower half of the rock, are gone in the present view, and as with other ‘New Series’ pictures, the photograph is now more consciously composed.     

Like the Vernal Fall, El Capitan has been photographed over the decades by a number of photographers using a similar vantage point.  From Weed, Muybridge, and Fiske, to Ansel Adams, the photographs communicate the essential majesty of the rock that seems never to have changed. 

For the 1861 and 1865-66 Watkins views, see Palmquist, op. cit., pl. 18 and p. 30.  Naef and Wood, op. cit., compare photographs by Weed, Watkins, and Muybridge in figs. 43, 44, and 45.  A very similar Fiske view is reproduced in Hickman and Pitts, op. cit., p. 68, and a view by Fiske in winter, p. 54. Ansel Adams’s photograph of El Capitan in winter is reproduced in Yosemite and the Range of Light, pl. 90.