Carleton E. Watkins photographs, circa 1882

Carleton E. Watkins was born November 11, 1829 in Oneonta, New York. He moved to San Jose, California in 1851 at the height of the gold rush and worked as a daguerreotype photographer in a local photography studio. Around 1857, Watkins established his own photographic studio for portraits and landscape photography in San Francisco.

Watkins visited the Yosemite Valley in 1861, making 30 mammoth plate (18" x 22") and 100 stereographic photographs of the area. His mammoth plates of Yosemite Valley were the first photographs of this size to be made in California, and among the first depictions of the American West available to people living in the eastern United States. Due in part to Watkins' photographs, President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill in 1864 that declared the Yosemite valley "inviolable," and that paved the way for the National Parks system.

In 1865 the California Geological Survey (CGS) hired Watkins as their official photographer. While working for the CGS, Watkins became influenced by CGS Director Josiah Dwight Whitney’s interest in the Northwest. Watkins visited the Columbia River in 1867 and photographed the region extensively.

Financial problems caused Watkins to lose his Yosemite Art Galley in 1874, and subsequently to lose the rights to all of his prints and negatives to competitors J.J. Cook and Isaiah W. Taber. He later rebuilt his collection by revisiting and photographing the sites he had originally photographed. During his travels to rebuild his collection, Watkins met Frances Sneed and the two married on November 11, 1880. They had two children, a daughter, Julia and a son, Collis. Frances later managed Watkins' Montgomery Street studio in San Francisco.

In 1882, Watkins returned to the Northwest to create his "New Boudoir Series," which included Seattle, Port Blakely, Port Gamble, and Tacoma. On a second trip to the Northwest in 1890, Watkins made a series of stereoscopic views in Victoria, B.C., Canada. He extended this trip into Montana where he made mammoth plate views of the Anaconda copper mines and other subjects. Watkins' last large commercial job was to photograph the development work of the Kern County Land Company near Bakersfield, California. There, he made seven hundred photographs using 8" x 10" dry plate negatives.

In the late 1890s Watkins began to photograph the Hearst Hacienda near Pleasanton, California, for Phoebe Apperson Hearst, but ill health prevented him from completing the assignment. Watkins was in the process of negotiating with Stanford University for the sale of his glass plate negatives and photographs when the 1906 earthquake struck San Francisco and destroyed his studio and nearly all of its contents. By this time, Watkins was partially blind, in poor health and experiencing financial difficulties. He retired to his small ranch near Capay in Yolo County, which had been deeded to Watkins for unpaid services to the Southern Pacific Railroad. In 1910 Watkins' failing health led his family to commit him to the Napa State Hospital at Imola, California. He died on June 23, 1916 and was buried on the hospital grounds.