These largely unpublished photographs, some only recently discovered, were taken by Aby Warburg on his trip to the American frontier in 1895. Neither a photographer nor a native tourist, Warburg was a scholar with a camera. As seen though his own cultural and psychological perspective on art, these insightful photographs are significant not only to the study of Native American and frontier life, but also to an understanding of Warburg's unique vision of cultural history. 80 duotone photos.
Poignant and provocative, Crossing the Frontier is the first major photographic exploration of human use, development, and abuse of the Western landscape. Published to accompany a San Francisco Museum of Modern Art exhibition, the photographs in Crossing the Frontier are powerful, vivid, and unsentimental, spanning almost 150 years and including both found images and works by major classic and contemporary photographers. Also featured are essays on the photography, geology, mythology, and architecture of the West by four distinguished authors. In stark contrast to photography books that carefully present nature at its most pristine, Crossing the Frontier finds beauty in the devastation of the terrain, and explores the complex social, political, and cultural ramifications of this transformation.
This family album of the Western frontier shows what daily life was like for the diverse pioneers who crossed the Mississippi during the nineteenth century. It traces the successive waves of migration identified by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 as the frontiers of the trader, the miner, the farmer and the rancher.
Here is New York as it has never been seen before, tantalizingly balanced on the very edge of familiarity. It is a city unpeopled, bathed in extraordinary light, sometimes at sunset, sometimes dusted with snow. This is New York as a frontier of the unknown, a world of great beauty and private calm.
Faces of the Frontier showcases more than 120 photographic portraits of leaders, statesmen, soldiers, laborers, activists, criminals, and others, all posed before the cameras that made their way to nearly every mining shanty-town and frontier outpost on the prairie. Drawing primarily on the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, this book depicts many of the people who helped transform the West between the end of the Mexican War and passage of the Indian Citizenship Act.
Born in 1868 to a wealthy British family, Evelyn Cameron traded privilege for adventure, the lush English countryside for the austere eastern Montana badlands, a lavish estate for a tiny homestead shack. In 1894, at the age of 26, Evelyn turned to the burgeoning art of glass-plate photography as a way to support the Camerons' struggling horse ranch, producing some of the most remarkable images of pioneer life ever seen. Often riding twenty to thirty miles roundtrip, carrying her nine-pound camera around her waist and her wooden tripod in a gun scabbard, she spent thirty-four years documenting eastern Montana. She captured western landscapes: the ruggedly beautiful badlands, vast expanses of unfenced prairie, and otherwordly sandstone formations. And she photographed western characters: sodbusters, cowpunchers, and sheep shearers, stern-faced ranch families, and hopeful, dreamy-eyed immigrants. She also produced some of the first photographs of North American birds. Evelyn Cameron: Montana's Frontier Photographer showcases 117 of the finest and most fascinating images by this adventurer, homesteader, ranchwoman, and great American photographer.
Framing the West argues that photography was intrinsic to British territorial expansion and settlement on the northwest coast. Williams shows how male and female settlers used photography to establish control over the territory and its indigenous inhabitants, as well as how native peoples eventually turned the technology to their own purposes. Photographs of the region were used to stimulate British immigration and entrepreneuralism, and imagies of babies and children were designed to advertise the population growth of the settlers. Although Indians were taken by Anglos to document their "disappearing" traditions and to show the success of missionary activities, many Indians proved receptive to photography and turned posing for the white man's camera to their own advantage. This book will appeal to those interested in the history of the West, imperialism, gender, photography, and First Nations/Native America. Framing the West was the winner of the Norris and Carol Hundley Prize of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association.
