Politics

Ideas the photographic images were used to promote

As photographic technology developed, photographers were able to move out of the studio and beyond the single shot daguerreotype. The introduction of the wet collodion process allowed for photography to move outdoors and its images reproduced multiple times on paper. These images did not stand alone, but were integrated with text which promoted the greatness and opportunities awaiting those who ventured West. The photographs provided visual proof of the mineral wealth to be exploited, markets for manufactured goods and the political destiny America was meant to control. The photographs “depicted a world safe for American immigration and full of progress.”
(Sandweiss, 190)

Current political correctness will note the images portray a distorted picture. Success overrides failure, and positive overrides negative. This natural tendency results in more photographs were produced to romanticize the West and encourage tourism and development. There are more images of visual landscapes than urban decay, more effort to document Native American ethnography than Hispanic Heritage, more cowboys than urban laborers. The extent to which people only wished to document their good side can be best illustrated by this photograph of the David Hilton family from Nebraska. [1]

The photographer notes Mrs. Hilton demanded the image not be of her sod house, but did include evidence of her prosperity by photographing her pump organ.

Images which re-enforced the potential out West include:

• Giant Sequoias: Photographs of the giant sequoias, notably produced by Charles C. Curtis, encouraged tourism. The U.S. Government several tree trunks to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago to generate increase curiosity in the freak of nature. While the trees were placed on display to promote tourism and national pride, the government also established natural protection zones to preserve this feat of nature.

• Railroad photographs

• Mining and other natural resources

Predominant political themes enforced by the photographs

Manifest Destiny

Manifest Destiny was an expansionist concept prevalent in the 19th century which promoted the idea that the U.S. was deemed to expand across the entire North American continent. The photography of the American West was used to re-inforce the three key themes of “Manifest Destiny:

1. the virtue of the American People and their institutions;

2. the mission to spread these institutions, thereby redeeming and remaking the world in the image of the U.S.; and

3. the destiny under God to accomplish this work.” (Historian William E. Weeks, 1996 as quoted in wikipedia)

Frontier Thesis

Frontier Thesis, 1893: Historian Frederick Jackson Turner presented his Frontier Thesis to describe the American character at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Turner noted the nation’s character was indelibly shaped by the ability to pioneer out to the frontier. By having the ability to break with traditions and the freedom and move out West, allowed for new experiences and opportunities very different from the “Old World” in Europe.

Landscape artists of the period

While the survey teams, and the photographers, documented man’s influence on the land (future railroad routes, mining ventures, vast timber of the Giant Sequoias), the landscape artists produced a more spiritual image of the same vistas. Nancy Anderson’s essay on The Kiss of Enterprise compares work of four photographers and similar images by four artists. She concludes by stating the images “celebrate both the bounty of the West and man’s ingenuity in converting that bounty to his own use.” (qtd. in Treutner, 281) But as much as man’s triumph over nature should be celebrated, so did it forever change the physical landscape aggrandized by the painters.

Albert Bierstadt Donner Lake from the Summit, 1873

Contemporary uses of these images

Sierra Club

Sierra Club led by David Brower to reintroduce these photographs to push for environmental preservation.

Second & Third View

Klett, Mark, Manchester, Ellen & Verburg, Joann. Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project (1984). Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press

In the 1970s a historian, photographer and a geologist went back to revisit the sites of the nineteenth-century American West surveys. They sought to recapture the original locales in present day, capturing the original vantage point and using similar lens. Second view photographer Mark Klett reveals intimate details of the original photographers style and preferences. See MoCP.

KLETT, Mark, MANCHESTER, Ellen et VERBURG, JoAnn, ed. Second View, The Reprophotographic Survey Project, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1984, Jackson, William Henry, “Hot Springs and the Castle Geyser (Yellowstone National Park Collection)”, 1872, Klett, Mark et Bushaw, Gordon, “ Crested Hot Springs and the Castle Geyser, Yellowstone National Park Collection Wyo, 1978”

Third View was follow-up project occurring some twenty years after Second View. The focus this time moved away from the photographers’ style and to document the environmental changes in these well-known landscapes.