The Miners Cabin - Calaveras Grove 1876 - 1880

Carleton Watkins made this photograph, "The Miners Cabin - Calaveras Grove," using the wet plate collodion process, a technique that was crucial to the expansion of photography in the 19th century. Watkins’s process involved coating a glass plate with light-sensitive chemicals, exposing it in the camera while still wet, and then developing it immediately. It was labor intensive, requiring a portable darkroom tent in the field. The result is this highly detailed print, capturing the immensity of the felled sequoia with a lone figure standing beside it, giving scale. Photography at this time played a crucial role in shaping perceptions of the American West, and here, the felled tree is a symbol of both natural wonder and resource extraction, linked to industries like logging and mining. The photograph testifies to the amount of labour put into extracting resources from nature. Watkins, in his artful rendering, invites us to consider the complex relationship between human endeavor, industry, and the sublime, often contradictory, power of the natural world.