The Visual West
Croke, Bill
T he West certainly has a literary tradition, but its photographers and painters are at the heart of its culture. Stunning vistas translate to photograph, canvas, and celluloid better than to the...
...Moran's masterpiece The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone hangs today at the Department of the Interior's Washington headquarters...
...An interesting and eclectic group was assembled for this endeavor...
...Using large cameras with small apertures to capture light and physical textures with crisp brilliance, Adams predetermined precisely what tone each part of the scene to be photographed would produce in the final print...
...King's work in California gave us Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, a Gilded Age bestseller and classic of the genre...
...Silver chloride was likewise applied, then the glass carefully placed in the camera's plate holder...
...Hillers, a German immigrant, had little photographic skill when he met Powell in Salt Lake City...
...There is a photograph of him partially visible as he worked in a darkroom tent pitched literally atop a stony peak...
...The explorer always referred to it as the "Plateau Province...
...The existence of exploding geysers like Old Faithful, Steamboat, and Great Fountain, the massive, slick white travertine terraces of Mammoth Hot Springs, along with bubbling mudpots and acre-upon-acre ofmisting fissures in the earth, all amidst 130 waterfalls, trackless forests home to elk and grizzly, craggy mountains, and the cobalt-hued waters of Yellowstone Lake were until then¡ªlike Bridger's colorful yarns¡ªnot to be believed...
...Jackson¡ªanother Union veteran and survivor of the carnage of Gettysburg¡ªhad come West in 1866, married, and set up a photographer's studio in Omaha...
...The typically energetic Jackson spent days dodging thunderstorms, driving his nervous mules up harrowing mountain trails to get his equipment to the scene, and executing eight shots...
...Bridger¡ªa world-class raconteur, though illiterate¡ªwas famous for his fireside stories of "peetrified birds singing peetrified songs in peetrified forests," and for tales of transparent glass mountains and of winters so cold that voice echoes froze in the air till spring...
...Observed from a distance, the mountain's eternally snow-filled ravines present the viewer an almost perfect white crucifix...
...Moran's sketches and Jackson's stunning 400 photographs were the main impetus for President Grant's and the U.S...
...Moran missed this one, but Jackson—true to form—photographed the dozen Teton peaks from every angle, elevation, and perspective...
...Stunning vistas translate to photograph, canvas, and celluloid better than to the printed page...
...Adams was schooled in both earlier artists' work—it's as if Moran provided the subject and Jackson the technique...
...Toting nothing more than a backpack and sketch pads, he gathered the material for his 1875 The Mount of the Holy Cross...
...The terra incognita that Powell explored is today known as the "canyon country" of Utah and northern Arizona, at the time one of the great blank spots on the map...
...Thelens cover was removed, the shot taken with proper time exposure, and the plate holder extracted and taken to the immediate darkness of tent or wagon for developing, in a solution of pyrogallic acid, silver nitrate, alcohol, and water...
...Seven feet tall and twelve feet wide, its unveiling in 1873 caused one critic to write: "If ever a subject justified the use of a gigantic canvas, surely this one does...
...The work of Matthew Brady and Timothy O'Sullivan influenced a generation of postwar photographers, who—in the interest of making their own reputations—had nowhere to look but west...
...I have always held that the grandest, most beautiful, or wonderful in nature, would, in capable hands, make the grandest, most beautiful, or wonderful pictures," he said...
...The Yellowstone expedition set out from Fort Ellis (present Bozeman, Montana) two years later...
...River, mountains, and sky came together for one of the West's archetypal photographs...
...He photographed a near-pristine West in his youth and also sprawling ranches, mining towns that expired or grew into cities, and the epic construction of railroads, paved highways, and dams...
...The United States Geological Survey provided opportunities for scientist and artist alike...
...Add to this the dictates of the "wet plate" photographic process...
...But his hard-won images were the crowning achievement of Powell's second expedition...
...In the summer and fall of 1872, the Hayden Survey visited the region immediately south of Yellowstone, itself destined to be named a national park half a century later—Grand Teton...
...A sturdy, good-natured mule named "Hypo" carried 400 carefully packed glass plates...
...The painting was awarded a medal atthe 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia...
...When he shot Grand Tetons, Snake River, dark clouds above the peaks hid the sun, creating a stark primeval scene...
...As a contemporary to Artists Point will testify, Moran's rendition of the scene is utterly realistic, right down to the geologic stripes of the multi-hued canyon walls...
...A photographer's outfit weighed an average of three hundred pounds and was usually packed on mules...
...Meanwhile Moran sketched Yellowstone, which in later life he nostalgically called "my love...
...Moran's was an art to match the stunning new scenery, and he would go on to paint landscapes in what would become twelve different national parks...
...Beaman turned out to be a malcontent who eventually quit the expedition...
...Accompanying the Hayden party into this 3,300-square-mile sulphurous wilderness was the painter Thomas Moran (1837-1926) and the photographer William Henry Jackson (1843-1942...
...It is haunting and magnificent—and all Moran and Jackson...
...Jackson's "stereographs"¡ªpictures that when placed in a "stereoscope" offered the viewer a three-dimensional view of a landscape¡ªwere all the rage in Victorian Age parlors, dispelling the mountain men's myths and inaugurating the West's first tourist boom...
...All this took approximately one hour...
...Jackson's 300-pound outfit consisted of his wagon-drawn dark-box and a double-barreled stereo camera...
...A typical year included driving 150 horses from California to a Colorado cattle ranch, then taking time off to photograph an assembled group of "Madame Cleveland's painted ladies," posed before a brothel in the wild cow town of Cheyenne, Wyoming...
...The chief beneficiary of this realist tradition was the twentieth century's premier American landscape photographer, Ansel Adams...
...Realizing that the otherworldly topography he had passed through demanded one, his second descent of the river in 1871 included E. 0. Beaman and Jack Hillers, the latter especially distinguishing himself as a first-rate recorder of the Colorado Plateau's divine scenery of mesa, cliff, and canyon...
...While traveling through the Colorado Rockies in August 1873, Jackson—while also photographing such breathtaking subjects as Longs Peak, Mt...
...Jackson, too, spanned the centuries, living to age ninety-nine...
...Jackson was doing freelance work for the Union Pacific Railroad when Hayden hired him in 1869 for a survey through western Wyoming and Utah's Uinta Mountains...
...Field photography in the nineteenth-century West required not only technical skill, but patience, an untiring work ethic, and sheer physical strength...
...Lieutenant George Wheeler mapped desert Arizona and southern Nevada in the interest of mining and railroad development, employing O'Sullivan as photographer...
...Elbert, and Estes Park—shot the legendary Mountain of the Holy Cross in the Sawatch Range near present Leadville...
...It was until that time a place known only as a source of legend and tall tale, via mendacious mountain men such as John Colter and Jim Bridger...
...Photographers literally worked on the edge of disaster...
...Ferdinand V. Hayden, medical doctor turned geologist, studied the northern Rockies, including the mysterious Yellowstone region...
...Though vividly recorded in his Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries, Powell's first legendary and hardship-shadowed conquest of the rapids-plagued Colorado in four dories (he lost one boat loaded with supplies and scientific instruments, and three of his near-starved crew were murdered by Indians) lacked a photographer...
...Jackson and Moran share one masterpiece...
...In the same year as Powell's second trip down the Colorado, Ferdinand V. Hayden made his survey of the region that would include the future Yellowstone National Park...
...Thousands of lithographs were sold worldwide, underwriting western wanderings that Moran continued into the twentieth century...
...Congress's enthusiastic designation of the Yellowstone country as the nation's first national park on March 1, 1872, only seven months after the pair returned...
...But the man most identified with the survey was John Wesley Powell, a one-armed Union army veteran, polymath, and amateur scientist, who at the siege of Vicksburg had passed his leisure time hunting fossils in the trenches...
...Thanks to Hollywood, America has had an almost century-long visual love affair with the West...
...Hillers took the first pictures of the interior of the Grand Canyon...
...His roughly 10,000 negatives, housed in the Ford Museum in Detroit, are our most comprehensive photographic history of the American West...
...Moran was the first American landscape painter to cut his ties with the Hudson River School's idealized, Jeffersonian view...
...It was literally virgin territory, and to do justice to its immense beauty required of the photographer an energetic sense of adventure, a capacity for awe and love of the romantic, and diamond-honed technical skills...
...During the survey's forty days in Yellowstone, Jackson averaged ten shots per day—an incredible achievement given the circumstances of wilderness travel coupled with the primitive technology extant...
...In John Ford's Stagecoach, Monument Valley itself is a bigger star than John Wayne...
...The Civil War was the world's first military conflict in which the nascent art of photography was a primary component in its narrative...
...At Yellowstone's Tower Falls, Jackson took five separate shots, after each shot scrambling up the steep gravelly slope to the dark box parked on the canyon rim, all the while carefully clutching the plates wrapped in damp cloth to prevent exposure...
...The Fortieth Parallel Survey of Henry Adams's brilliant protégé Clarence King examined the arid waste between the Great Salt Lake and the Sierra Nevada and laid out the route of the Central Pacific Railroad (today shadowed by Interstate 80...
...Affectionately called "photographers' assistants," there was always the chance that one would stampede or fall off a cliff...
...First, a clean glass plate was painstakingly covered with collodium, a sticky and flammable chemical that if carelessly spread would scratch the glass...
...The result over the next thirty years was an outpouring of oils and watercolors, including Great Springs of the Firehole River, Crystal Falls, Shoshone Falls, The Golden Gate, Cinnabar Mountain, Tower Creek, Tower Falls, The Devils Slide, and Gardiner River...
...Between 1867 and 1879 four government surveys explored and mapped what came to be known as "the public domain" of the Rockies, the Great Basin, and the "Plateau" West, a half-billion acres of which continue to be administered today by the Department of the Interior and its subsidiaries...
...His Yellowstone fame now rating him four assistants, Jackson ranged far from the main survey party, wearing out his crew and pack animals as he zestfully marched up game paths and Indian trails at elevations up to 12,000 feet, amid snow and sleet and lightning strikes, and camping on frigid, windblown summits...
...The 14,000-foot peak had up to that time only been seen by Indians, early Spanish explorers, and wandering fur trappers...
...All five pictures came out well...
...And he was one of the few landscape photographers of his time who also excelled at portraiture¡ªsome five hundred of his images of Southwest Indians are collected at the Smithsonian...
...As the record shows, once again he got the goods...
...Moran, a year behind, had a somewhat easier time...
...He initially worked as a teamster and found time to take pictures during his travels...
...That's one hour of tedious work per shot...
Vol. 36 • January 2003 • No. 1
