Carleton Watkins Thursday Tours

This is an Archive of a Past Event

Public tours of special exhibition, Carleton Watkins: The Stanford Albums. Carleton Watkins, one of the greatest landscape photographers of the 19th century, is perhaps best known for mammoth-plate photographs of California’s legendary Yosemite Valley. The photographs were unprecedented in their size and detail, and helped convince the 38th U.S. Congress and President Lincoln to pass the Yosemite Act of 1864, the first official step toward preserving the Sierra Nevada valley for public use. To commemorate the 150th Anniversary of this Act, the Cantor will mount a major exhibition of Watkins’s Pacific Coast photographs, all drawn from three unbound albums in Stanford Library’s Special Collections and Archives. The exhibition will feature iconic and rarely-seen images of Yosemite, the area around San Francisco, and of the Columbia River and Oregon.