This work is an explanation of the role of the nineteenth-century photographer as a conscious historian of the West - a recorder of events, people, and places as surely as they were the diary-keepers, journalists, and writers. Like them, he exercised choice in what he recorded; unlike them, he documented aspects of reality that we can know in no other way. Photographers as documenters are too often casually, even carelessly, regarded. Photography And The Old West is intended to convey as clearly as possible how people learned to use a camera and became camera-wise in an individual way; how tools and materials affected photographic seeing; and what a few of the many photographers hoped to express. This work is not a comprehensive survey but rather a selective look at some of the imagery of the West that a few conscious photographers produced.
Resurrecting scores of rare images of the 19th century American West, "Print the Legend" offers engaging tales of ambitious photographic adventurers, and misinterpreted images. Chronicling both the history of a place and the history of a medium, this book portrays how Americans first came to understand western photos and to envision their expanding nation. 138 illustrations.
The histories of the North American West and photography have been intertwined since photography reached America. From the middle of the 19th century, images of the West have continuously played a significant role in defining the ways the region is perceived not only within America but around the world. Eye on the West presents the work of seventeen contemporary photographers of the West, including David Plowden, Laura McPhee, Miguel Gandert, Karen Halverson, Toba Tucker, Richard Buswell, John Willis, David Ottenstein, Lauren Henkin, and Will Wilson. Beautiful reproductions of 34 photographs are accompanied by brief essays by George Miles and by the artists themselves, contributing to multiple conversations about how visual art continues to reflect and shape our understanding of Western American society, culture, and politics. Distributed for the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Exhibition Schedule: The Beinecke Rare Books & Manuscripts Library, Yale University (09/01/18-12/16/18)
This volume explores how photography has shaped and transformed the American West in the collective imagination, from 1850 to today. This investigation includes a broad range of styles, from nineteenth-century works made a few years after the invention of photography to iconic images of the twentieth century, to pictures made in the early twenty-first century. Includes works by famous photographers and artists such as Cindy Sherman, Diane Arbus, Larry Sultan.
This edited collection explores the complex ways in which photography is used and interpreted: as a record of evidence, as a form of communication, as a means of social and political provocation, as a mode of surveillance, as a narrative of the self, and as an art form. What makes photographic images unsettling and how do the re-uses and interpretations of photographic images unsettle the self-evident reality of the visual field? Taking up these themes, this book examines the role of photography as a revelatory medium underscored by its complex association with history, memory, experience and identity.
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.
Swim out into the Pacific and look back to the shore. To the couple kissing in the hot afternoon, and the young girl rollerskating along the front, and the family setting up camp on the soft, warm sand. To the blues and yellows and pinks of fierce, determined revelry. Santa Monica, where the wooden pier juts out into the Pacific Ocean, marks the end of Route 66. The great American journey west culminates here, and it is on this short stretch of coast that Sarah Lee began shooting her photographic series in 2015. In West of West Sarah Lee and Laura Barton explore the idea of the West in shaping American identity, with its idealism and notions of the frontier, and what the American West means in an age of political turbulence, when the East is the rising global force and the frontier is shifting once more.
As American settlement expanded westward in the 1860s, the U.S. government undertook large-scale investigations of its new territories. Images of the West: Survey Photography in French Collections, 1860-1880 presents memorable glass-plate photographs from these federal surveys. The selection includes breathtaking views of such iconic sites as Yosemite, as well as lesser-known ethnographic portraits taken by Timothy H. O'Sullivan, William H. Jackson, and William Bell, among others. The accompanying essays discuss how the photographs were used to promote white settlement, how their distribution at home and abroad contributed to the aggrandizement of the American West, and how the exploitative ideology underlying the use of photography extended to attitudes toward both American landscapes and American Indians. The images are all drawn from French public collections, which hold an astonishing number of these U.S. survey photographs. Accompanying an exhibition at the Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, Images of the West provides a critical new examination of a bygone era.
This book is a rich record of life in small-town southeastern Alaska in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It is the first book to showcase the photographs of Vincent Soboleff, an amateur Russian American photographer whose community included Tlingit Indians from a nearby village as well as Russian Americans, so-called Creoles, who worked in a local fertilizer factory. Using a Kodak camera, Soboleff, the son of a Russian Orthodox priest, documented the life of this multiethnic parish at work and at play until 1920. Despite their significance, few of Soboleff’s photographs have been published since their discovery in 1950. Anthropologist Sergei Kan rectifies that oversight in A Russian American Photographer in Tlingit Country, which brings together more than 100 of Soboleff’s striking black-and-white images. Combining Soboleff’s photographs with ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, Kan brings to life the communities of Killisnoo, where Soboleff grew up, and Angoon, the Tlingit village. The photographs gathered here depict Russian Creoles, Euro-Americans, the operation of the Killisnoo factory, and the daily life of its workers. But Soboleff’s work is especially valuable as a record of Tlingit life. As a member of this multiethnic community, he was able to take unusually personal photographs of people and daily life. Soboleff’s photographs offer candid and intimate glimpses into Tlingit people’s then-new economic pursuits such as commercial fishing, selling berries, and making “Indian curios” to sell to tourists. Other images show white, Creole, and Native factory workers rubbing shoulders while keeping a certain distance during leisure time. Kan offers readers, historians, and photography lovers a beautiful visual resource on Tlingit and Russian American life that shows how the two cultures intertwined in southeastern Alaska at the turn of the past century.
California is the theme of this postcard folio book. Photographer Ansel Adams lived in California for his whole life and this collection of his images of his homeland portrays ares including the Sierra Nevada, Yosemite National Park, the Pacific coast, San Francisco and the Monterey coast.
