photography and the American West

Since the mid-19th century the American West has repeatedly presented a challenge to photographers, both in capturing its physical character and in giving visual form to aesthetic and cultural concerns. Over time, their images have served not only to anchor a certain conception of the West in the national consciousness, but also to combine the reality of nature and the meanings attached to it in constantly new ways. Although in the 19th century the interest of early photographers in the West and its landscape was not primarily aesthetic, a characteristic manner of visual treatment eventually became established. This ‘view tradition’ shapes general perceptions of American landscape to this day.

John Charles Frémont, in collaboration with the professional photographer Solomon Carvalho (1815-99), brought several hundred daguerreotypes of (later) Kansas, Colorado, and Utah back from his fifth expedition to the West in 1853-4. But it was after the Civil War (1861-5) that photography of the territories west of the Mississippi developed in a sustained way. Photographers like Jackson, O'Sullivan, Muybridge, Watkins, and Weed accompanied government-sponsored expeditions and recorded their geographical discoveries with a view to economic development and the building of communications. To this extent, therefore, their pictures were part of the economic, political, and ideological process of colonization. They functioned both as topographical documents in the reports of the US Geological Survey (see attached feature) expeditions and, especially in the hands of the railway companies, as publicity for emerging tourist destinations. The popularity and spread of the images, and the professionalization of landscape photography, was closely linked to the wet-plate process and other technical advances. By c.1890, for example, millions of stereoscopic views of western landscapes, and of newly established coastal cities like San Francisco, were in circulation. Photography, precisely in its character as a new medium, contributed decisively to the identity formation of the still youthful nation. Watkins's sublime and monumental photographs of Yosemite Valley, and Jackson's of Yellowstone, with their suggestion of a virgin paradise, not only influenced the specific protective legislation of 1864 and 1872, but helped to form the western myth that remains a cornerstone of American identity. They also fitted the nationalistic and theological discourse, already established in relation to painting, about the landscape's elemental significance for the nation. For the photographs of virgin land in the West seemed to mirror the ‘manifest destiny’ that privileged America in the evolutionary narrative of democracy and civilization.

In the first half of the 20th century this romantically and pantheistically inflected conception of the western landscape was taken further by the photographs of Ansel Adams, only to be superseded in the 1970s by the new visual language of young photographers influenced by conceptual art. In Adams's photographs, the geographical and temporal specificity of the West was abstracted into visual metaphor and a vision of nature that could be mystically experienced. Another key figure was Laura Gilpin, who not only made breathtaking landscapes of the south-west, but whose work responded (like that of some earlier photographers, e.g. Hillers) to its human and cultural geography. Especially notable were her studies of the Navajo people at Red Rock, Arizona, in the 1930s and 1950s.

From 1970 photographers showed increasing interest in changes in the landscape. In particular, and mostly in the form of small-format image series, the alterations caused by conflict between man and nature were registered: deforestation, pollution, and the appearance of highways, tract houses, and industry. Given the ‘real’ West's urbanization and suburbanization, the ‘mythical’ West could no longer function as a symbolic counterpoise to civilization. The New Topographics group (e.g. Robert Adams, Baltz, Shore) consciously averted their gaze from the West's still untouched—because legally protected—landscapes, in order to document, as objectively as possible, the ecological problems and general denaturization of the landcape produced by human activity. More explicitly and rigorously historically motivated was the Rephotographic Survey Project of 1977-9, which compared the landscapes as captured by Jackson, O'Sullivan, and their colleagues with the modern reality.

Andrew J. Russell Railway construction in the Green River Valley, Wyoming, near Citadel Rock, 1868. Albumen print

— Julia Galandi-Pascual

Featured article: American West, 1867-1879.

Bibliography

• Jussim, E., and Lindquist-Cock, E., Landscape as Photograph (1985).
• Perpetual Mirage: Photographic Narratives of the Desert West (1996).
• Sandweiss, M. A., Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (2002)