The Robert Koch Gallery presents Mammoth Plates, an exhibition of early photographic images of California by Charles Leander Weed (1824–1903), Carleton E. Watkins (1829–1916), and Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904). Shown in conjunction with Matt Black’s exhibition, New World Atlas: California & Nevada, the exhibition draws a connection between 19th-century images of grandeur and a present-day view shaped by environmental fracture. The exhibition includes rare prints, among them a Watkins image that is not included in the J. Paul Getty Museum’s comprehensive catalog of his work, Carleton Watkins: The Complete Mammoth Photographs, published in 2011, as well as prints for which few examples are known to exist. The exhibition will feature mammoth plate albumen prints dating from 1864 through 1883.

Weed was the first to photograph Yosemite, producing some of the earliest images of the Sierra Nevada in 1859. Watkins followed in 1861, expanding on that visual record with photographs that would later lend weight to the growing conservation movement. Muybridge began making landscapes in the late 1860s. They contributed to the wider picture being formed of California’s dramatic terrain, including places like Yosemite Valley and Lake Tahoe.

All three photographers worked with the wet collodion process, which required photographers to coat, expose, and develop glass plates on site while the emulsion was still wet. This method was technically demanding and physically cumbersome, but allowed for exceptional clarity and detail, especially with the contact printed large-format mammoth plate albumen prints, which have a wider tonal range than later produced gelatin silver prints.

While these photographs are often linked to the idea of an untouched wilderness, they were made at a time of rapid expansion and change. Their precision and scale helped shape public perception of the West and played a part in early efforts to preserve parts of it. At the same time, they contributed to the mythology of the frontier, a place still being imagined even as it was being altered.

Placed in dialogue with Matt Black’s look at contemporary California and Nevada, Mammoth Plates offers a layered reflection on how the land has been seen, understood, and represented over time. The pairing invites a reconsideration of what has changed, what has endured, and what these images continue to ask of us.