Couple seated on granite overlooking Yosemite Valley and Half Dome

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Perched on a slab of granite above Yosemite Valley, the couple in this picture look out over the valley floor toward Half Dome, the sheer monolith that has defined the view since the park's earliest days. Visitors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often posed on such outcrops, treating the scene as a kind of personal milestone as much as a sightseeing stop. Yosemite had been set aside by Congress in 1864 and became a national park in 1890, and images like this one helped shape how Americans imagined the valley as a place to be experienced firsthand.

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