C. E.  Watkins  is widely regarded as the finest landscape photographer of the 19th century. He received world-wide acclaim for his Yosemite photographs taken between 1861 and 1881. His work, shown to Congress and to President Lincoln, helped establish Yosemite as the first area in the world specifically protected from development to preserve its natural beauty.

To evoke the sense of volume that is so much a part of Yosemite, Watkins built a camera of unprecedented size to hold 18 X 22 inch, glass-plate negatives. He was the first American photographer to make these mammoth-plate photographs, and other photographers quickly followed his lead.  

Watkins was a master of photographic technique whose artistic perceptions were original and innovative. He was the first to photograph landscape for its own sake, untouched by any evidence of civilization. He has been described by authoritative sources as the most important American photographer before Alfred Stieglitz. The great American landscape artist, Albert Bierstadt, painted several of Watkins' Yosemite perspectives.  

Watkins was at the height of his artistic prowess in the summer of 1867 when he traveled to Oregon. He made both mammoth-plates and stereograms in the vicinity of Portland and in the Columbia River Gorge.  His portfolio of mammoth-plate prints, published under the title of Photographs of The Columbia River and Oregon is a masterwork, and is of historical importance as a visual  record of the area. 

Since all Watkins' negatives and many of his prints were destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, complete sets of his Oregon work are rare, and only three are known to exist. In 1979, a complete portfolio of his Oregon mammoth-plate prints sold at auction for $100,000, an unprecedented sum for a 19th-century American photographer.  That sale sparked a renaissance in American landscape photography.  In the intervening years Watkins' importance has continued to grow. In April of 2000, a single Oregon print, "Cape Horn Near Cililo",  sold at auction for $236,750.  

The re-photographs paired here with the original Watkins view show how the Columbia river Gorge has changed between 1867 and 2001. Re-photographing some of Watkins' the vantage points was a challenge; several are now under water, flooded by Bonneville Dam and The Dalles Dam. His vantage point for the remarkable "Cape Horn Near Cililo" is in the middle of Interstate 74, which presented another sort of challenge. 

Watkins' life did not end happily. When he died in 1916 at the Napa State Hospital, he was blind, destitute, and all but forgotten.