Explore Tutucanula, El Capitan (3600 ft.) Yosemite

Read About This Photograph by Carleton Watkins

While the giant monolith El Capitan (also called “Tutucanula” by the indigenous Ahwahnechee people) looms in the background, a thin decaying tree trunk in the foreground grabs the viewer’s attention. In nature, where changes can occur in seconds or centuries, Carleton Watkins found the perfect subjects to convey the theme of the temporary versus the permanent.

Watkins’s images helped define America’s preference for landscape views depicting rugged wilderness and celebrating spectacular landforms on the grandest of scales. Photographs such as this one revealed the beauty of the Yosemite Valley and convinced people that they should protect its trees from being torn down for homes and businesses. John Conness was a representative from California who served in the U.S. Senate in the 1860s. He owned a set of photographs by Carleton Watkins and proposed that Yosemite Valley be protected from development. In 1864, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Valley Grant Act, marking the first time that the federal government reserved land for conservation reasons. Under this act, the state of California was required to protect the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove (a grove of sequoia trees in the southern part of what is now Yosemite National Park). The bill decreed that the “premises shall be held for public use, resort, and recreation.”

Questions

Write or discuss your responses.

• Look closely at this photograph. What do you notice first? Where do your eyes move next?
• Which lines and shapes are repeated to form patterns?
• Imagine you are walking around inside this scene. What might you hear and smell? How would you describe the mood?
• This photograph was made when there were no roads to these areas of Yosemite Valley, during a time when a camera was as big and heavy as a backpack filled with books. Instead of camera film, negatives were printed on giant glass plates that weighed about four pounds each. How do you think the photographer was able to make and bring home 30 giant plates from the wilderness?