Pulpit Rock c. 1873

Carleton Watkins made this albumen print, Pulpit Rock, using a process dependent on both light and chemistry. Watkins’s landscapes are remarkable for their sharp detail. This clarity was achieved by coating a glass plate with a light-sensitive emulsion of egg white, and then exposing the plate in a large-format camera. The resulting negative would then be contact-printed onto paper, creating a positive image. The making of these images was painstaking. The scale of the equipment meant that photography was inescapably entwined with commercial expansion. Watkins worked for the railroad, whose tracks appear in the foreground of the scene, documenting the American West for eager consumers back East. The resulting images offered sublime views, but also served as a kind of visual inventory – a register of resources available for extraction. So next time you look at a photograph, remember that its material construction is just as important as what it depicts.