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They called it the black art because of the silver-nitrate. It stained your fingers. There was no way to avoid getting it on your hands—you were always in too much of a hurry. You had to coat the glass plate evenly with a liquid solution of gun cotton and ether, sensitize it in silver-nitrate, transfer it into a holder in total darkness, make your exposure, remove the plate and develop it all while it was still wet. Once it dried it was not nearly as sensitive to light. This was the wet collodion process and it was the height of photographic technology in 1872 when Eadweard Muybridge lugged himself, his mammoth plate camera, his portable darkroom, and all the necessary chemicals to Union point above the Yosemite Valley to make a photograph that was the beginning of a tradition.
Muybridge was not the first photographer in the Yosemite Valley. Carleton Watkins made his reputation there ten years earlier and by 1872 was already selling prints in his extravagant San Francisco gallery. But by placing his tripod in almost exactly the same spot where Watkins made his photograph, Muybridge was beginning the tradition of going out of his way to capture an image almost exactly like one previously captured by another photographer. He was shooting the repertoire—that collection of familiar locations that have gradually become the staple of landscape photography. Year after year, these same locations are photographed in nearly the same way and year after year publishers print the shots in magazines, books, calendars, cards and advertisements.
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©2003 Mark Meyer
