On the second segment of this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast, Katherine Siegwarth discusses her new Amon Carter Museum exhibition “Big Pictures.” The exhibition goes back to the 1860s to demonstrate that size in photography pre-dates the ‘Big Germans’ and that photographers have almost always wanted to make their prints bigger. It opens on March 5 and runs through April 21. Siegwarth is the Carter’s Luce Curatorial Fellow for Photographs.
This is a 1864 Charles Leander Weed from the Amon Carter’s collection: The Vernal Fall, 350 Feet High. Yo-semite Valley, Mariposa County, Cal. Back in 1859, Weed had became the first photographer to visit Yosemite. While there, he took a series of 10-inch-by-14-inch pictures.
In 1861, Carleton Watkins became the second photographer to travel into Yosemite. Watkins’ pictures weight in at about 22-inches-by-18-inches, almost three times the size of Weed’s pictures, a factor that helped them become world-famous.
Sometime between Watkins’ first visit to Yosemite and 1864, Weed got himself a bigger camera and went back to the valley. This is one of the pictures he took on that later trip.
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