Overexposed: Whiteness and the landscape photography of Carelton Watkins

During the second half of the nineteenth century, American photographers and painters combed the Western frontier recording a host of geological wonders for enthusiastic east-coast patrons. As previous scholars have shown, the resulting images of the West encouraged the nascent American environmental movement and helped in generating Congressional support for the formation of the first national parks in the 1860s and 1870s. But late-nineteenth-century depictions of the land served the interests of European-American viewers in other, less benign ways as well. This paper argues that the landscape photographs produced by Carleton Watkins during the 1860s most of which contain no figures, or signs of human activity both reinforced the racial identity of European-Americans, and helped encourage the industrial development of some of the West's most singular natural sites.