American West, 1867-1879
This is a featured article for the topic American West, photography and the.
When armchair travellers of the late 19th century imagined the American West, their vision was profoundly influenced by the work of nineteen photographers, painters, and draughtsmen who travelled on four US Geological and Geographical Surveys of the Western Territories. Long regarded as ‘merely’ documentary, these rich, complex images advanced national agendas in scientific, political, and aesthetic arenas.
The photographers included William Bell (1830-1910), Jack Hillers, William Henry Jackson, Timothy O'Sullivan, and Carleton E. Watkins. They were generally perceived as technicians rather than artists, and were salaried team members from the outset, unlike the painters, who often came as guests and travelled at their own expense. Photography, a mechanical medium, modern and perceived as objective, was employed to enhance the visual record made by scientific topographers. Led by the scientists Ferdinand Hayden, Clarence King, John Wesley Powell, and the engineer George Wheeler, the earliest survey began in the summer of 1867, and ended with the creation of the US Geological Survey as a branch of the Department of Interior in 1879. Until this time, the surveys were funded by annual appropriations from the US Congress to the War Department and the Department of Interior.
Though the scientific projects of the surveys ranged from ornithology to botany, their mission was to gather topographical and geological information in enormous tracts from present-day Nebraska to California. Much of this territory had been acquired in the Mexican-American War of 1848, but was uncharted due to its vastness and the pre-Civil War view that the dry and barren terrain was largely uninhabitable. However, the pro-business administration of President Ulysses S. Grant (in office 1869-77) that promoted mining, railway construction, land investment, and resolution of the ‘Indian problem’ generated new energy in these areas.
Among the photographic subjects are stark, oddly shaped rocks and buttes in sublime parade; open vistas of seemingly unpopulated land behind survey team members placed in the foreground to establish scale; or lone inhabitants, Native American or Hispanic, whose presence subversively suggests a distant echo of the past reverberating in the Anglo-dominated present. These contemplative subjects in isolated locales appear alongside more populated scenes and fertile (i.e. commercially viable) settings, including camps, towns, mines, mineral deposits, waters, forests, and portraits of survey leaders and teams. All functioned as the ‘publicity stills’ of the surveys.
Pressured to obtain annual reappropriations from Congress, survey leaders distributed photographs to politicians and generated dynamic stories with illustrations to float their research in the public eye. Photographers made rough prints in the field, then sent several shipments each summer of glass-plate negatives to a photographer in the Treasury Department in Washington, DC. A number was scratched on the negative, and proof prints were made for immediate distribution. Some photographers were free to sell their images commercially and keep the profit, while others had to return a percentage of sales to their survey leader.
Photographs were also reproduced as wood-engraved or lithographic illustrations in official survey reports and popular illustrated magazines. The first was published in 1869 in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, ‘Photographs from the High Rockies’, accompanied by thirteen wood-engravings after O'Sullivan photographs. In 1874, survey director Powell was commissioned by Scribner's Monthly to complete the three-part series ‘The Cañons of the Colorado’, generously funded and with rights granted to Powell for the engraved illustrations. When the government published Powell's survey report in 1875 it featured the Scribner's-funded engravings after drawings by Thomas Moran and photographs by Hillers.
The survey photographers Jackson and O'Sullivan sent work to the Vienna International Exhibition of 1873. Jackson stayed out of the field in the summer 1875 season to organize the display of survey photographs for the 1876 Philadelphia International Centennial Exposition. One of the most impressive aspects of this installation in the Department of Interior exhibition at the US Government Building was a ‘window-wall’ on the west side of the building, made of photographic positives of landscape subjects from the Hayden and Powell surveys printed on panes of glass.
The late 20th-century American photographers Mark Klett, Ellen Manchester, Joann Verburg, Rick Dingus, and Gordon Bushaw travelled to the original sites of numerous 19th-century survey photographs in the ‘Rephotographic Survey Project’ (1977-9). The team made an enormous contribution to the technical and analytical record of the photographic processes employed by the early photographers, which were largely undocumented. Noting extreme camera angles, deliberate attention to time of day and shadow placement, and unusual posing of figures to demonstrate scale, Klett et al. demonstrated that the survey photographers, imbued with a sense of drama and the aesthetic of the sublime, captured scientific content subjectively rather than objectively.
In fact, while photographic historians have sometimes argued for readings of survey landscape subjects parallel to the geological and cosmological theories promoted by the survey directors, the validity of their arguments varies with the author's understanding of the history of science. As historians of science debate and revise the received view of 19th-century scientific theories and their proponents, such interpretations are compelling but warrant readers' caution. Aesthetic language, pictorially evocative, abounds in the survey reports, magazine articles, photographic journals, and photographers' writings of this period. Photographers, striving to be seen as artists, consulted with survey painters, and survey leaders promoted the artistic merit of photographic imagery with the oft-repeated term ‘picturesque’.
