Lincoln Saved This Valley in the Middle of the Civil War, Because of Photographs

🏔️ In the summer of 1861 a photographer took twelve mules into the Sierra Nevada carrying a camera that used sheets of glass eighteen inches by twenty-two. Not a figure of speech: the negative was the size of a small window pane, coated by hand, exposed while wet and developed in a tent on a mule track. Three years later, in the middle of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln signed a bill setting aside the valley those photographs showed, to be held for public use and inalienable for all time. That is eight years before Yellowstone, and it is the first time any national government took a piece of landscape off the market permanently because it was beautiful. 📷 Carleton Watkins had the camera built specially, because an albumen print is made by laying the negative straight onto the paper in sunlight. There is no enlarger, so the print is exactly the size of the negative. If you want to hold the texture of a cliff face, you need a negative that big. Nobody in Congress had been there. Almost none of them would ever go. They voted on the evidence of photographs, during a war they were not certain of winning. 💔 Watkins went bankrupt in 1875 and lost every negative to a creditor, who sold the work under his own name. He went back out and shot it all again. In 1906 the San Francisco fire burned his studio with the new negatives inside. He was committed to a state hospital in 1910 and died there in 1916, in an unmarked grave. The prints other people had bought and framed outlived every negative he ever made. The film also covers the people driven out of the valley in 1851 to make the emptiness in these pictures, Muir and Roosevelt's three nights at Glacier Point, and Hetch Hetchy: a valley inside the park that was dammed because there were not enough photographs of it. 📷 Every picture in this film is a real archive photograph. Nothing is recreated. 🗂️ All images are public domain, from the Library of Congress, the US National Archives and Wikimedia Commons. #yosemite #nationalparks #photography #history #carletonwatkins