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Emily Greenwald
On the History of Photography and Site/Sight Seeing at Yellowstone

DRIVING THROUGH ARCHES NATIONAL PARK in 1991, I passed a brown sign with a white camera on it. At the time, I thought it indicated a place to stop and take a picture. I have since learned that the camera, in the language of informational signage, identifies a "viewing area." When you look at the ways in which photography has shaped visual experience in America's national parks, it is not surprising that the camera has come to represent a place to look at scenery. Photographs helped make the case for creating national parks, informed the development of park infrastructure, and promoted park tourism. Even before visitors carried cameras into the parks, they sought views they had seen in railroad brochures, magazine articles, and stereocard sets. And when visitors did carry cameras, they often tried to reproduce those views.	1
Yellowstone National Park, established in 1872 as America's first national park, is a good place to look at the ways in which photographic media and the built environment have worked together to create prescribed ways of seeing nature. The effect is most obvious at a particular site/sight: the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River, looking upstream at the river's lower falls. Photographs of this scene varied somewhat during the park's first few decades, but they solidified by the early twentieth century and took on a remarkably fixed form, as the three photographs displayed here demonstrate. The first image appeared in Yellowstone Park: A September Holiday, a printed narrative of a group's 1890 journey through the park.1 The group, made up of five women and one man, carried at least two Kodaks, the portable personal cameras that had first become available in 1888. The second photograph is from an album Margaret Page created to commemorate her family's trip to Yellowstone in 1922.2 The album consists of photographs and handwritten captions with no narrative. The third picture was taken by Shawndra Holderby, a friend of mine, on her 2001 visit to the park.3 Shawn and other friends have sent me their snapshots of this scene—increasingly, they arrive in digital format—and they all look very much like this one.	2
Yellowstone Park: A September Holiday, 1890, 22. Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Yale University.
Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone from Margaret Page photo album, 1922, page 34, Photograph Archives, Montana Historical Society, Helena, MT, call number PAC 98–91.A1.
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