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Watkins was among the first photographers to choose Yosemite Valley as his theme. Yosemite's spectacular landscape fascinated Americans, and there was a steady demand, in Victorian America, for images of the Valley.

Watkins first photographed Yosemite Valley in 1861. On the strength of those photographs, William H. Brewer, the head of the California State Geological Survey, hired Watkins to produce photographs for The Yosemite Book (1868).

Written by the geologist Josiah D. Whitney and illustrated by Watkins, this lavish, quarto-sized volume featured tipped-in albumen contact prints (original prints, not reproductions). This beautiful "gift book" was distributed to members of Congress, and helped persuade Congress to preserve Yosemite Valley as the nation's first national park. Watkins's stunning photographs played a significant role in shaping Americans' understanding of the West and its unique landscapes.

Today, Watkins is best known for his giant wet-plate photographs, which he took using a camera of his own design, fitted with a Grubb Aplanatic Landscape wide-angle lens. These mammoth plates -- 18 x 22 inches in size -- were fragile and difficult to handle, especially in the field. As Watkins's career progressed, he began transporting his equipment -- all 2,000 lbs. -- with a mule cart. Though the wet-plate collodion process was awkward and unforgiving, Watkins preferred the wet-plate collodion process for its ability to precisely capture tone quality and detail.

To prepare a wet-plate collodion negative, Watkins coated a glass plate with a highly-flammable collodion mixture containing salts, and then immersed the prepared plate in a silver nitrate bath. The plate must exposed to light while still wet. The "exposed" plate must be kept away from light, until it is developed and fixed. Watkins' mammoth wet plates were large, awkward, they had to be developed and fixed in the field, and they often broke in transit. However, anyone who has seen one of Watkins's mammoth photographs in person, understands why Watkins chose this method. The photographs are astonishing in their clarity, tonal range, and overall richness.

In addition to producing photographic prints, Watkins took hundreds of stereographs, or "stereoviews," of Western landscapes. For many Easterners, Watkins's stereoviews represented their first introduction to the West. Stereoviews were popular novelties, and middle-class Victorian families often kept special binocular viewers, or "stereoscopes," at home. These were small tabletop devices, shaped like a pair of binoculars, that allowed viewers to look at two images in stereo. The doubled images created the impression that the viewer was gazing into three-dimensional space.

To create a stereoview, a photographer must use a special camera, fitted with two lenses. The two resulting images differ slightly, and when viewed in stereo, seem to "layer" themselves, creating the illusion of multiple depths.

Throughout most of the nineteenth century, transcontinental travel remained expensive and difficult. Watkins's stereographs were aimed at the "armchair traveler," the middle-class American with a keen interest in the broader world, who lacked the resources to travel in person, but who might purchase magazines, travel books, and stereoviews for edification and entertainment. These stereoviews were extremely popular in Watkins's time, and he constantly battled publishers who released pirated reproductions of his work.

Exotic landscapes were especially popular with nineteenth-century audiences, and Watkins catered to this demand. He created hundreds of stereoviews of Yosemite Valley, of San Francisco and its surroundings, and of the Pacific Coast. Unusual subjects, such as the Big Trees of Mariposa or the Yosemite Falls, were enormously popular with East Coast audiences. They bolstered the image of America as a blessed land, brimming with natural bounty.

In the 1890s, Watkins suffered a reversal of fortunes and lived, briefly, in a boxcar with his family. Collins Huntington, one of California's "Big Four" and a childhood friend, deeded the Capay Ranch in Yolo County to Watkins, and in 1896 Watkins resumed his photograph activities. By the 1890s, however, the elderly Watkins suffered from arthritis and was almost completely blind. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake marked the end of Watkins's careers as a photographer -- devastating fires destroyed his San Francisco studio and all of his equipment. Committed to the Napa State Hospital for the Insane in 1910, Watkins dies on June 23, 1916. He is buried in an unmarked grave on hospital grounds. His photography, however, continues to shape subsequent generations' perceptions of the West and its landscapes. Watkins also left a lasting impact upon the development of American photography, serving as a key influence for photographers like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. Today, photographers continue to turn to Watkins's images for inspiration.

Watkins's photographs are currently on view at the J. Paul Getty Center in Los Angeles. Visitors can visit Watkins's massive, bellows camera, and view a wide selection of Watkins's photographs, all drawn from the Getty's sizable photography collection. The exhibition closes on March 1, 2009.