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Char Miller on Gifford Pinchot, Photographer

"I THINK my first great realization came through my camera," photographer Edward Weston noted in his daybook. "At least it brought me into closer contact with nature, taught me to observe more carefully, awakened me to something more than casual noting and romantically enjoying." By looking through his lens, Weston believed he could see into his self, a fusion that made him feel, if only ephemerally, at one with the landscape he hoped to capture on film: "Even then I was trying to understand, getting closer, becoming identified with nature. She was then as now, the great stimulus."1	1
Although Gifford Pinchot was no Edward Weston, he shared the artist's belief in the camera's affective power and visual impact. That's why he lugged one with him on an arduous western journey he undertook as confidential forest agent for the Department of Interior during the summer and fall of 1897. Interior Secretary Cornelius Bliss had hired him to evaluate the controversial national Forest Reserves, and to report on which of their 21 million acres should stay within the emerging system, and which should be returned to the public domain. Pinchot, who a year earlier had examined some of these lands as a member of the National Academy of Sciences Forestry Commission, was delighted with his new assignment—it would get him back into the woods, increase his understanding of their conflicted political context, and enhance his prospects for creating (and heading) a federal agency to manage these astonishing public lands. This once-in-a-lifetime experience had begun in mid-July, when, with his brother, Amos, he took a train west to Blackfoot, Montana; it concluded in mid-November, after an exhausting tour that had carried Pinchot through Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Wyoming, and South Dakota.	2
Everywhere Pinchot traveled, he snapped away at the remarkable landscapes through which he moved. Presumably, he expected these images of badly burned and grazed lands, soaring forests of hemlock or fir or pine, and stunning panoramas would help convince his audience that forestry and foresters were essential to the conservation of the many natural resources and beauties he identified during his work. That is the strategy he had employed in the heavily illustrated 1893 pamphlet he published to accompany the Chicago World's Fair exhibit he mounted about his initial forestry endeavors in Biltmore, N.C.; and when in 1898 he became the fourth head of the Bureau of Forestry (and later as the first chief of the Forest Service), Pinchot made ready use of this modern medium to convey his convictions in congressional hearings, departmental publications, and public assemblies. But if he had expected that his 1898 report to Secretary Bliss would be replete with the images he captured in the West, he must have been disappointed. It contained none of his photographs, a remarkable lapse given the striking quality of this hitherto unpublished exposure of the small mining town of Monte Cristo, Snohomish County, Washington.	3
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