Skip to main content

Survey photography and the landscape in 19th century America


Carleton Watkins, The Vernal Fall, from the Yosemite Book, 1868





Carleton Watkins. Yosemite Falls and the Merced River. Yosemite National Park.




View from the Sentinel Dome, Yosemite, by Carleton Watkins


As Ian Jeffrey observed (1),  19th century American landscape photography recorded "virgin" nature in two complementary "modes": in the first, contemplating the novelty, and the magnitude of its subject, the photographer documents vast vistas from the distance, not simply physical distance per se  but a properly visual distance appropriated to handle the unique, novel forms of the subject. In the second, photographic vision "tames" nature and organizes the natural panorama by way of an aesthetic code akin to that of the contemporary landscape painters. 

Survey photography by Weed, Watkins or by Muybridge, O' Sullivan, and others, can be seen as a kind of "second" conquest of the West, the continuation of territorial conquest  "by other means", or, as Ian Jeffery suggests,  explorations of the land with the goal of disclosing future uses and potential developments. In a sense, we can observe that "contemplative" and "active" vision are fused into one in the American imaginary: in the, at the same time objective and energetic portraits of nature by the landscape photographers  the human energies discovering, molding and refashioning the land are also reflected and portrayed.

Marcelo Guimarães Lima


(1) Jeffrey, Ian, Photography, A Concise History, London,  1981, pp.58-60 




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Group f/64 Manifesto (1932)

Ansel Adams by Dorothea Lange Group f/64 Manifesto The name of this Group is derived from a diaphragm number of the photographic lens. It signifies to a large extent the qualities of clearness and definition of the photographic image which is an important element in the work of members of this Group. The chief object of the Group is to present in frequent shows what it considers the best contemporary photography of the West; in addition to the showing of the work of its members, it will include prints from other photographers who evidence tendencies in their work similar to that of the Group. Group f/64 is not pretending to cover the entire of photography or to indicate through its selection of members any deprecating opinion of the photographers who are not included in its shows. There are great number of serious workers in photography whose style and technique does not relate to the metier of the Group. Group f/64 limits its members and invitational names to those worke

Post-photography

"The job of the photographer in the 21st century has become increasingly challenging as the practice is an overwhelmingly populist business. Anyone who has access to a camera has the power to become an artist, leaving a plethora of cached evidence on the internet for public consumption. This “found” internet content serves as a vast laboratory for major experimentation, underpinning the concept of post-photography, with endless possibilities for artists to recreate original works using avant-garde techniques drawn from both the digital and analogue eras." Fiona Martin (short presentation of the book Post-Photography: The Artist with a Camera by Robert Shore) http://www.aestheticamagazine.com/post-photography / Perhaps there is less novelty here, regarding the context of photography transformed by the new image technologies developed in the late 20th century, in the particular sense that the early impact of photography itself transformed the regimes of vision and impact

Calotype process

"The calotype negative process was sometimes called the Talbotype , after its inventor. It was not Talbot's first photographic process (introduced in 1839), but it is the one for which he became most known. Henry Talbot devised the calotype in the autumn of 1840, perfected it by the time of its public introduction in mid-1841, and made it the subject of a patent (the patent did not extend to Scotland). The base of a calotype negative, rather than the glass or film to which we have become accustomed, was high quality writing paper. The sheet of paper was carefully selected to have a smooth and uniform texture and, wherever possible, to avoid the watermark. The first stage, conducted in candlelight, was to prepare what Talbot called his iodized paper. The paper was washed over with a solution of silver nitrate and dried by gentle heat. When nearly dr