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In 1964, the United States Congress passed the Wilderness Act, which established a national wilderness preservation system composed of federally owned areas designated by Congress as “wilderness areas.” The Act defined wilderness as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” With panoramas of glowing mountain ranges and thundering waterfalls devoid of any human presence, the photographs of Ansel Adams have come to represent the epitome of wilderness imagery.

By the early 1970s, however, a younger generation of photographers that included Robert Adams (no relation), Frank Gohlke, Joe Deal, Lewis Baltz and others began to take issue with this notion of nature. Deriding Ansel Adams’ views of Yosemite as “sappy” (Deal’s word) and Romantic, they photographed grain elevators, suburban housing developments at the base of mountain ranges, urban architecture and parking lots featured in the New Topographics exhibition at the George Eastman House in 1975.

In more recent decades, scholars have re-evaluated the very notion of wilderness, arguing that the concept of uninhabited, pristine nature itself is a complex cultural construction that ignores the native peoples who had lived on “wilderness” lands for centuries, as well as privileging human beings over other forms of life. Moreover, critics argue that fetishizing distant wild locales absolves us of concern for places and marginalized people  closer to home. As historian William Cronon wrote in 1995, “wilderness embodies a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural,” adding “to the extent that we live in an urban-industrial civilization but at the same time pretend to ourselves that our real home is in the wilderness, to just that extent we give ourselves permission to evade responsibility for the lives we actually lead.”[footnote]William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” in Carolyn Merchant, Major Problems in American Environmental History, 2^nd ed. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005), 385-86.[/footnote]

A number of photographers working today who are represented in this exhibition, including Nigerian photographer George Osodi, have replaced the idealized wilderness with the realities of environmental degradation. While earlier photographers such as Ansel Adams used their work to argue for wilderness conservation, contemporary photographers like Osodi document issues confronting us directly.

The daguerreotype process, named for its French inventor, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, was one of the first forms of photography. Images were exposed in-camera on sensitized metal plates coated with a thin layer of highly-polished silver, then developed, fixed, and mounted in protective cases. Since no negatives were used, daguerreotypes are one-of-a-kind images.

Between 1839 and the early 1850s, the heyday of the medium, daguerreotypes were used primarily to make studio portraits. Sitters posed with their heads held still by metal braces and their hands perched on the arms of chairs or holding objects like books. Because of the bulky equipment, complicated process, and long exposure times, outdoor scenes were much less common. Despite the difficulty of viewing an image on a mirrored surface, daguerreotypes were valued for their amazing detail.

In 1839, the invention of photo very different photographic processes was announced to the world. The daguerreotype, invented by Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, was a unique image on a metal plate coated with mirrored silver. Although the process was capable of rendering precise detail, the metal surface and lack of negative to make prints limited it as a practical photographic process. The calotype, perfected by William Henry Fox Talbot, was a negative/positive process that produced multiple prints on paper, but the paper negatives used resulted in fuzzy prints lacking fine detail.

In 1851, the wet-plate collodion process was developed. It combined aspects of both the daguerreotype and the calotype. Light sensitive chemicals suspended in sticky collodion could be poured on metal plates to produce single tintypes, or on glass to produce negatives from which prints could be made. The collodion was only light sensitive while wet, which required the exposing and developing to happen within about a ten-minute period. Prints made from glass negatives had the fine detail of a daguerreotype, as well as the calotype’s potential for multiple prints. During the second half of the nineteenth century, photographic paper was coated with egg whites to bind photographic chemicals to the paper. Durable prints could be made in large numbers, although the thin paper’s tendency to curl required prints to be mounted to a cardboard backing. Because the chemicals used in making wet-plate collodion negatives were sensitive only to blue light, a sky with clouds was almost impossible to photograph. Landscape photographers often worked around this limitation by using multiple negatives to make a single print – one exposed for the land and another for the sky.

Before the first non-native people entered Yosemite Valley in 1849, it was home to a Native American tribe known as the Ahwahneechee, who lived in the region for over 3000 years. In the mid-nineteenth century, the United States army drove them out of what we now call Yosemite National Park. One of the first white settlers to make his home in the valley was Galen Clark. Clark established a hotel for visitors in the Mariposa Grove, home to the Giant Sequoia trees.

In 1861 the most important early photographer to visit the Yosemite region, Carleton Watkins, had a mammoth camera constructed to hold 18 x 22 inch glass plate negatives. Entering the valley with a twelve-mule pack train, he not only brought his camera and glass plates but also chemicals, a portable darkroom, and other equipment, including a camera designed to take small paired photographs called stereographs. These would be viewed through a special stereoscope that would merge the two images into one with the illusion of three-dimensional depth. Together with his mammoth plate photographs, Watkins’ stereographs helped raise public awareness about the wonders of Yosemite Valley.

Watkins returned multiple times to the valley in 1861, and again in 1865 and 1866 while working for the California State Geological Survey. Although his stereographs only provided Anglicized names for landscape features, his mammoth plate photographs frequently gave both the Ahwahneechee and the English versions of places with titles such as Piwyac, the Vernal Fall and Pompompasos, the Three Brothers.

Partly on the evidence of Watkins’ extraordinary photographs, in 1864 Abraham Lincoln signed a bill declaring the valley protected, paving the way for the national Parks system. Other photographers soon made their way to Yosemite. Eadweard Muybridge, better known for his studies of human and animal locomotion, photographed the region in 1867 and again in 1872. Using the long exposures required by the technology of the day, early photographers pictured rivers as smooth surfaces and waterfalls and blurred flowing water.

In 1890, an act of Congress created Yosemite National Park. With the completion of the Yosemite Valley Railroad in 1907, tourists began visiting the area in droves. Among them was the fourteen-year-old Ansel Adams, who roamed the valley taking snapshots with a Kodak box camera. In 1927, Adams would produce his first important series of Yosemite photographs, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras. Adams would continue to photograph Yosemite for the rest of his career, producing the iconic wilderness photographs that established his reputation as the best-known American landscape photographer of the twentieth century.