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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


 
Figure 1
    Yellowstone Park: A September Holiday, 1890, 22. Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Yale University.
 


 


 
Figure 2
    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.
 


 


 
Figure 3
    Canyon and Lower Falls from Artist Point. Photo by Shawndra Holderby, 2001.
 


 
      The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone was first described in print by Nathaniel P. Langford in 1870 and first photographed by William Henry Jackson in 1871.4 It became a featured attraction of the park, and descriptions and images of it circulated widely. The built and ideological structures that shaped sightseeing at the canyon developed quickly because visitors perceived it as the pinnacle of the park's visual landscape. In 1880, after observing heavy foot traffic to the spot that became known as Lookout Point, park superintendent P. W. Norris built a railing at the overlook, and staircases, railings, and platforms marked other places along the canyon rim as significant viewpoints.5 During the 1880s, those points gained specific names, and a road was built along the north side of the canyon, with trails to all of the overlooks. The south side of the canyon developed slightly later than the north. Initially, the Yellowstone River blocked travel to the opposite rim, but boats crossed the river as early as 1890.6 A rope ferry was established in 1896.7 By 1904, visitors could drive across the Chittenden Bridge and take the road along the south side of the canyon.8 This network of roads and trails at the canyon channeled tourists to the same places where previous visitors had stood. 3
      From the start, promotional literature and guide books used a combination of words and images to move tourists through the landscape along identical paths and to direct their eyes, again and again, to the same vistas. As early as 1882, guide books encouraged visitors to travel through the park in a loop, saving the canyon for last. As one book instructed, "By this route, all the objects of interest are seen in order of a climax ... In this way the tourist is always deeply interested, and fully appreciates what he sees."9 4
      This became a trope for guidebooks and promotional literature, and tourists echoed it in their own writings. The 1890 photograph from A September Holiday reflects visitor experience from this early period. Compositionally, it echoes but does not exactly replicate Jackson's work, still in circulation in the 1890s, and similar photographs, etchings, and drawings used to promote the park.10 The Kodak-wielding tourist took this image from a slightly different angle than Jackson's but also put the falls squarely in the center, highlighting the craggy notch through which the falls pour, and capturing a bit of the canyon below. 5
      Margaret Page's 1922 photograph of the Lower Falls and canyon is a slightly personalized take on the image that came to dominate promotional literature and tourist photography of the canyon by the early twentieth century. Taken from the south side at a lookout called Artist Point, it places the falls slightly off center and in the upper third of the frame, seeking to capture as much of the canyon as possible. Commercial views of this scene tended to keep the falls at the center, but they took in the canyon's steep walls and the ribbon of river stretching through.11 Page's photo album also demonstrates the persistence of the 1880s loop tour of the park. She put Mammoth Hot Springs pictures first, followed by Old Faithful and the geyser basins, then Yellowstone Lake, and finally a series of photographs from the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. 6
      Visitors today travel through the park more eclectically than their early twentieth-century predecessors, starting at various entrances and seeing sites in no set order. Their cameras can zoom in on desired subjects, and they shoot in color. But their photographs of the Lower Falls and canyon look very familiar, in large part because the tourist geography of the canyon area has not changed much in the last century.12 Neither has the impulse to take a photograph that looks like those encountered before. Shawn Holderby's photograph from Artist Point looks a lot like Margaret Page's, and like mine, and like many others taken over the last one hundred years. Shawn places the falls a little above and to the right of center, trying to get plenty of canyon wall and river in the picture. She also positioned her camera so the two trees frame the river, rather than blocking it. Recalling what it was like to stand at Artist Point, Shawn said, "It was like looking at a picture." 7
      Tourists' descriptions of Yellowstone landscapes have always been saturated with the rhetoric of pictures, sometimes drawing from the art of painting but quite often from photography. This practice began soon after the park's creation. In 1873, Harry Norton described the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone as follows: "The subject is beyond the conception of the most vivid imagination—language is inadequate to express the unapproachable picture presented—the eye only can photograph the gorgeous scene."13 8
      Charles Taylor, who toured the park in 1900, warned visitors, "Do not take your first look at the Grand Cañon while tired in mind and body. After a night's rest you will be able to do justice to the scenes around you. Otherwise you will miss a perfect appreciation of one of the greatest pictures in the Park."14 At the same time, concessionaires at the national parks sold what they called "views," photographs of the park scenery. The vistas of park landscapes were also called views, resulting in a complete overlap between the thing seen and the photograph of the thing seen—both were views.15 9
      In addition to visitors' accounts, which circulated as books and magazine articles, guide books and promotional literature provided instruction about how to look at the landscape pictorially. A 1922 Northern Pacific Railway brochure noted, "The canyon and Lower Fall—a composite picture—are seen to the best advantage from Artist Point and Inspiration Point."16 Before long, guide books gave tourists precise advice about how to photograph park scenery. The earliest example of this for Yellowstone might be the 1920 edition of the Haynes guide to Yellowstone, which includes a section titled "Suggestions for the Amateur Photographer."17 Photographic advice at Yellowstone usually focused on geysers, which appear to have posed a particular challenge for tourist photographers. Today, a plethora of books address photographing features of specific national parks. In one notable example, the Yosemite volume of PhotoSecrets offers the camera-carrying the opportunity to "Follow in the footsteps of Ansel Adams with this all-color guide for photographers. Over 70 pictures YOU can take, plus maps and tips."18 10
      Historians of photography have argued that, over time, the camera came to stand in for the eye, allowing us to see things that we can't necessarily perceive with human eyes.19 But with repeated exposure to the same subjects and composition conventions, the park visitor's eye has come to stand in for the camera. Like Shawn's sensation of "looking at a picture" from Artist Point, the visitor's view is mediated by photographs and photography, even when she or he is not looking through a camera. That brown sign with the white camera, which I have now encountered marking scenic overlooks in many parts of the country, neatly captures the fusion of eye, camera, and picture that developed as our scenic sensibilities were shaped by photography in the late nineteenth century. This way of seeing became entrenched, almost frozen, at well-traveled sites such as the national parks, where the built environment and travel literature combine to push each visitor into the same visual relationship with the landscape as all those who came before. 11


Emily Greenwald is an Associate Historian at Historical Research Associates, Inc., in Missoula, Montana. She is the author of Reconfiguring the Reservation: The Nez Perces, Jicarilla Apaches, and the Dawes Act (New Mexico, 2002).



NOTES

1. Yellowstone Park: A September Holiday (1890), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.

2. Margaret Page photo album (1922), Montana Historical Society Photographic Archives, Helena, MT.

3. Shawndra Holderby photograph (2001), in possession of the author.

4. A digital image of Jackson's 1871 photograph is available on the National Park Service's web site, http://www.nps.gov/archive/yell/slidefile/history/jacksonphotos/Images/03116.jpg.

5. Yellowstone National Park web site, http://www.nps.gov/yell/tours/canyon/lookoutp.htm.

6. A. B. Guptill, Practical Guide to Yellowstone National Park, Containing Illustrations, Maps, Distances, Altitudes, and Geyser Time Tables (St. Paul, MN: F. J. Haynes and Bro., 1890), 101.

7. Reau Campbell, Campbell's Complete Guide and Descriptive Book of the Yellowstone Park, New Revised 2nd ed. (Chicago: H.E. Klamer, 1914), 34.

8. Ibid., 35. On roads and the development of national parks, see David Louter, Windshield Wilderness: Cars, Roads, and Nature in Washington's National Parks (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006).

9. W. W. Wylie, Yellowstone National Park, or, The Great American Wonderland (Kansas City, MO: Ramsey, Millett, and Hudson, 1882), 9–10. In 1886, a section of road from the canyon to Norris Geyser Basin was completed, which saved, in the words of one guide book, "upward of forty miles of doubling, and allow[ed] a longer time than heretofore at places of transcendent interest." See Grand Tour Guide to the Yellowstone National Park (St. Paul, MN: W. C. Riley, 1889), 37.

10. See, for example, a Jackson print dated c. 1892 that appeared in an 1898 sales catalog of Jackson's work on the Library of Congress web site, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/det.4a32155.

11. See, for example, a digital image of a postcard published by F. Jay Haynes around 1920 on the National Park Service web site, http://www.nps.gov/archive/yell/slidefile/history/postcards/fjhaynes/Images/11515.jpg.

12. Published sources occasionally note changes in infrastructure, such as this brief note in a 1939 guide book: "In 1938 the former platform supported by a scaffold at Artist Point was replaced by natural rockwork, increasing both the safety and capacity of this famous view point, without marring the beauty of the canyon." Haynes Guide: Handbook of Yellowstone National Park (St. Paul, MN, and Yellowstone Park, WY: Haynes, Inc., 1939), 119.

13. Harry J. Norton, Wonder-land Illustrated; or, Horseback Rides Through the Yellowstone National Park (Virginia City, MT: Harry J. Norton, 1873), 38.

14. Charles M. Taylor, Jr., Touring Alaska and the Yellowstone (Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Co., 1901), 377–78.

15. The double meaning of "view" continued at least into the 1930s. See, for example, United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, "Yosemite National Park, California" (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1939), 9, 27.

16. Northern Pacific, Yellowstone Park Line (Chicago: Poole Bros., 1922), 9.

17. Haynes New Guide and Motorists' Complete Road Log of Yellowstone National Park (St. Paul: J. E. Haynes, 1920), 146–47.

18. Andrew Hudson, PhotoSecrets Yosemite: The Best Sights and How to Photograph Them ([La Jolla, Calif.]: PhotoSecrets Publishing, 1997).

19. See, for example, Michelle Henning, "The Subject As Object: Photography and the Human Body," in Photography: A Critical Introduction, 2nd. ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 217–50.

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