Though published about forty years ago, the best introduction to the classic Yosemite images is still David Robertson’s West of Eden, which includes reproductions of some of the first-known photographic images of Yosemite Valley, taken by Henry Ayres. A more recent collection edited by Amy Scott, Yosemite: Art of an American Icon, catalogues an exhibition that brought together artworks in various media (mostly painting and photography) by artists long associated with Yosemite and by contemporary artists who may have altogether different motives. These works are accompanied by brief essays expressing the curatorial framework of the show, which travelled to four museums in the American West between 2006 and 2008. In her introduction, Scott observes that “Seeing Yosemite in artistic terms is a longstanding American practice… Artists were Yosemite’s earliest proselytizers, [and] their work helped ensure that it emerged in the public view … as a cultural asset rich in metaphors that supported the national agenda of expansion.”
Soon after Yosemite’s “discovery” by non-Indigenous people in the mid-1850s, two important nineteenth-century photographers became interested in the valley: Carleton Watkins (1829–1916) and Eadweard Muybridge (1839–1904), the latter famously associated with California Governor Leland Stanford’s bet that when a horse is racing all legs are off the ground at one moment in time. Muybridge immigrated to the United States from England, and while in the US he operated a bookstore in San Francisco where he sold his own images of Yosemite along with images made by Watkins. Muybridge made his first images of Yosemite in 1867, and he returned in 1872 with a large-format camera. Three biographies of Muybridge are noteworthy. In River of Shadows Rebecca Solnit situates Muybridge within the surrounding culture, which she describes as a “technological wild west.” River of Shadows reveals how Muybridge contributed to the invention of moving pictures, in part through his books on human and animal locomotion. Examples of his chronophotographic studies of animal movement are easy to find on the internet. Marta Braun’s Eadweard Muybridge offers a more conventional account of why Muybridge left England and finally returned there at the end of his life. Brian Clegg’s The Man Who Stopped Time goes into some detail about Muybridge’s private life (he was accused of murder but declared innocent on account of temporary insanity). Of interest for purposes of the present essay is the fact that some of Muybridge’s photographs (and many made by Watkins) were instrumental in the campaign to make Yosemite a national park.
Carleton Watkins was born in Oneonta, New York, arriving in California in 1851. He visited Yosemite earlier than Muybridge did, experiencing the valley for the first time in 1858. He returned in 1861 and came to know James Mason Hutchings. Watkins’s photographic work in Yosemite is detailed in Weston Naef’s Carleton Watkins in Yosemite. A more complete biography is Tyler Green’s Carleton Watkins: Making the West American. Most of Watkins’s photos—those of mining camps and other locations in the West as well as those of Yosemite—appear in Carleton Watkins: The Complete Mammoth Photographs, edited by Weston Naef and Christine Hult-Lewis. Watkins fell on hard times late in life. He lost his sight and health and thus his income. He was eventually committed to the Napa State Hospital for the Insane, where he died in 1916.
At about the same time Muybridge and Watkins were photographing Yosemite, a German painter often associated with the Hudson River School was making his name with enormous paintings of Yosemite and other locations in the American West. The artist was Albert Bierstadt (1839–1902), and his life is told in Peter Hassrick’s biography Albert Bierstadt: Witness to a Changing West. Bierstadt’s impact on American painting is also discussed by Gordon Hendricks in Albert Bierstadt: Painter of the American West. Bierstadt arrived in Yosemite in 1863 and remained there for seven weeks. His ideas for many paintings were developed during this time. Like the works of Watkins and Muybridge, Bierstadt’s paintings became instrumental in support of the natural wilderness parks idea.
Many will already be familiar with important role photographer Ansel Adams (1902–84) played in establishing Yosemite’s international reputation. Adams was born in Berkeley, California, and he made his first photos of Yosemite with a box camera given to him as a child by his father. Jonathan Spaulding provides an in-depth biography of Adams in Ansel Adams and the American Landscape, but Spaulding was not able to include many of the famous Adams images in his book. More recently, Mary Alinder, who served as Adams’s assistant, offers a more personal account of the master in Ansel Adams: A Biography. Anne Hammond’s Ansel Adams: Divine Performance provides a more analytic view of Adams as a photographer of nature. Many are aware that Adams was one of the founders of the Sierra Club. Although his photography is universally admired, some critics believe that he “sold out” to corporate America (or to celebrity), and that his photographs actually endangered the national parks by encouraging too many visitors. Publications that feature Adams’s images of Yosemite and the West are legion, but a unique new selection with a foreword by Pete Souza, former photographer to President Barack Obama, has recently appeared: Ansel Adams’ Yosemite.
It is difficult to imagine an essay about Yosemite that fails to mention rock climbing. Galen Rowell (1940–2002) combined his passion for climbing with his love of photography, and this comes through in his book The Vertical World of Yosemite. His more famous book, Mountain Light, explains his unique methodology and philosophy of photographic vision, and how this approach is related to the arresting images he captured in photographs of mountain landscapes from Yosemite to Tibet. Alex Honnold’s climbing achievement in Yosemite is documented in a recent movie, Free Solo, which details his preparations and free climbing ascent of El Capitan in 2017. A video documentary that this writer has often used in class is Yosemite: The Fate of Heaven, narrated by Robert Redford. This documentary covers multiple aspects of Yosemite, including its history, present use, and the value of conserving the park for future generations.
