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Reviews
Print the Legend: Photography and the American West
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By Martha A. Sandweiss
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Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 2002. Photographs, notes, index. 416 pages. $39.95 cloth.
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Reviewed by Richard W. Etulain
University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
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This valuable book is notably important for two reasons. It not
only displays Martha Sandweiss's nonpareil knowledge of photographs
of the nineteenth-century American West, but it also helpfully instructs
historians and general readers on how to rethink their study and
use of photographs. This handsome book, superbly presented on glossy
paper and in appealing layout, overflows with valuable insights
from the country's leading authority on photography and the American
West. A thoughtful, easy-to-follow study, the volume will appeal
to historians, students of photography, and nonspecialist readers.
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1
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Sandweiss deals with photographs of the West from the mid-1840s to the 1890s. She discusses visual representations of the Mexican American War, frontier explorations and railroad surveys, western expansion generally, Native Americans, and a few cowboys. The development of daguerreotypes, panoramas, and wet-plate photographs are treated in the first chapters. The next sections continue examinations of these technologies as well as later dry-plate and point-and-shoot Kodak photographs. All these topics are thoroughly researched, as the forty-five pages of notes attest. |
2
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Print the Legend provides a feast of insights. Exhibiting her training in the field of American Studies, the author continually sees photographs in their illuminating cultural and technological contexts. Extensive examinations of John Banvard's Mississippi River panoramas and John Wesley Jones's daguerreotypes as well as of the Indian galleries of George Catlin and John Mix Stanley fill the first chapters. Here and later, Sandweiss shows how daguerreotypes failed to provide the robust, adventurous narratives that explorers, travelers, and expansionists wanted to give their audiences. In the 1860s, Emanuel Leutze's mural Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (1861) and the colored lithograph based on Frances Palmer's drawing Across the Continent: "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way" (1868) furnished the tub-thumping, empire-minded illustrations the public and agents of Manifest Destiny seemed to desire. |
3
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Advancements in technology, as the author makes very clear, allowed giant leaps forward in photography. Well-known photographers such as Timothy O'Sullivan, Carleton E. Watkins, John K. Hillers, and the most storied of all, William Henry Jackson, were important cameramen accompanying government-sponsored survey parties in the late 1860s and 1870s. In her longest chapter, " 'Mementoes of the Race': Photography and the American Indian," the author shows that once Natives lost control over photographs of themselves, their stories largely became those of American photographers. That meant Indians were now depicted as a "lost race," as part of a nostalgic past that included the decimated buffalo and the vanished wilderness. A final, brief epilogue argues that cowboy photographs by Montanan L.A. Huffman and sod-house scenes by Solomon Butcher along with the artwork of cowboy artist Charles M. Russell memorialized an Old West beyond the horizon. |
4
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Valuable books like this one always provoke questions. Why close with the 1890s, for example, when nostalgic views of a vanishing West continued well into the twentieth century? Most of the author's illustrations come from the Beinecke Library at Yale University, the Amon Carter Museum, and the Amherst College Library. Is that because these libraries hold the best photographs of the West or because Sandweiss was trained or worked at these institutions? Indeed, are not the author's Yale connections everywhere apparent here? Residents of Oregon and the Pacific Northwest might also ask: why so little on the Oregon Country? Near the end of her valuable book, the author asserts that photographs have, over time, "inform[ed] and shape[d]our master narrative of the nation's western past" (p. 343). Yet, how can there be an ongoing master narrative of the region if, as the author argues, "artifacts ... can still evoke ... the past, but always in negotiated and contingent ways" (p. 342)? Won't conclusions about the West change as often and rapidly as new viewers study and interpret it? |
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These are quibbling questions. Know this: Print the Legend is now the best volume available on the intertwined story of photography and the American West. Smoothly written, invitingly published, and expansive in its research, Martha Sandweiss's much-praised study belongs on the top shelf of books about the cultural history of the American West. |
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