Carleton Watkins: The Stanford Albums

Closed Monday and Tuesday. This exhibition of 83 photographic prints by Carleton Watkins—perhaps America's most influential 19th-century landscape photographer—celebrates the 150th anniversary of the Yosemite Grant of 1864, the first official step toward preserving the Sierra Nevada Mountains for public use and establishing the National Park system. The breathtaking prints capture the beauty of the Northern Pacific Coast's most majestic wilderness sites as well as the dramatic transformation of isolated territories due to exploration, settlement, logging, and mining. The prints were originally contained in three albums: Photographs of the Yosemite Valley, Photographs of the Pacific Coast, and Photographs of the Columbia River and Oregon and have never before been the subject of an exhibition.