1800–1877 · United Kingdom · Photographer
William Henry Fox Talbot
Early calotype studies of buildings, objects and light at Lacock Abbey.
The Pencil of Nature, 1844Source: Wikipedia
PHOTOGRAPHER · 1829–1916 · UNITED STATES
Carleton Watkins
Mammoth-plate landscapes of the American West, vast and precise.
- Born
- 1829
- Died
- 1916
- Country
- United States
- Field
- Photographer
KNOWN FOR
- 1861Yosemite (mammoth-plate series)
- 1869The Yosemite Book (with Josiah Whitney)
WHY THEY MATTER
His Yosemite photographs influenced the U.S. Congress to protect the valley; his work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
THE LIFE
Watkins was born in New York and moved to California, where he took up photography. In July 1861 he carried a mammoth-plate camera using 18 by 22 inch glass plates into Yosemite Valley. Those pictures helped persuade Congress to preserve the valley. He remained one of the defining landscape photographers of the nineteenth-century West.
WHAT THEY SHOT WITH
Mammoth-plate camera (18x22 inch glass plates), Stereoscopic camera
Also born in Before 1850
1815–1879 · United Kingdom · Photographer
Julia Margaret Cameron
Soft-focus, close-cropped Victorian portraits and allegorical scenes.
Julia Jackson, 1867Source: Wikipedia
1820–1910 · France · Photographer
Nadar
Plain-backdrop studio portraits that let a face carry the whole picture.
Sarah Bernhardt, 1864Source: Wikipedia
1822–1896 · United States · Photographer
Mathew Brady
Studio portraiture and organised battlefield coverage on an industrial scale.
Abraham Lincoln (Cooper Union portrait), 1860Source: Wikipedia
1830–1904 · United Kingdom · Photographer
Eadweard Muybridge
Sequential studies of motion made with banks of cameras.
The Horse in Motion, 1878Source: Wikipedia