The Cathedral Spires

Carleton E. Watkins was an American photographer who pioneered large-format landscape photography in the nineteenth century, creating monumental albumen prints that documented the American West with unprecedented technical precision and compositional grandeur. Working with mammoth plate cameras, he produced iconic images of Yosemite Valley, the Columbia River Gorge, and railroad routes that shaped visual perceptions of westward expansion. His photographs combined commercial enterprise with aesthetic ambition, establishing landscape photography as a major artistic medium in the post-Civil War era.

San Francisco, CA, USA