The Tripod, 94 feet circumference 1865 - 1866

Carleton Watkins made this albumen print, "The Tripod, 94 feet circumference" sometime in the 1860's. It shows two donkeys standing in front of a giant sequoia tree in California. Watkins, among other landscape photographers, was employed by the Railroad to document the American West, so the image served the overtly political purpose of promoting expansion. The photograph’s sublime landscape aesthetic also evokes a sense of national pride and the idea of manifest destiny. Watkins was working in a period when the new medium of photography was deployed by institutions to classify nature and promote the idea of the West as a limitless resource for extraction. The image aestheticizes the domination of nature, with the diminutive donkeys emphasizing the scale of natural resources ripe for exploitation. To understand this photo better, one might dig into railroad archives, government documents, or the writings of environmental thinkers of the time. Art like this reminds us that its meaning is always tangled up with social and institutional forces.