Land Matters: Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity by Liz Wells: Chapter 3 After the Frontier

Wells contrasts the East Coast model of photography, based in the traditions of painting and quite European in focus, with that of the frontier. 'The West' is something of a misnomer in this context; the concept in photographic terms is more to do with the process of movement, of settlement in virgin territory, of discovering new and unusual landscapes.

Misrach is a more recent photographer who has engaged with political land use, such as this exhibition of border images.

Land, Landscape and the West

Reverting to type, much of the photography under this genre is discovery, adventure. Wells identifies two key forms of roamantic Edenistic:

•  a sense of intimacy;
• a sense of grandeur

She adds that there is a 'timeliness'.

Photographers moved with the new settlers, creating a pictorial history. The end reuslt is rather like the images one sees in pubs in Britain: sepia reproductions of 'that is how it was'. There was a subtext of 'women closer  nature' (Wells frequently refers subtly to gender politics), men as 'rugged individualists' - Marlboro territory as set out by Deborah Bright. It was a belief in the combination of individualistic men and technology that would tame the wilderness and open the West. 

I think one thing Wells and the others miss is that the 'Western' culture arose because of the lack of urbanisation, which is a key to people having the time to engage with cultural activity. Early settlers were of necessity rural and pragmatic with little time for reflection and the arts. It is hardly surprising therefore that photography records the adventurism, because that is what those that were there believed they were doing.

Typical was Richard Prince's Cowboys where the author used  rephotogpaphing to present idealised views of the early iconography.

Photography contributed to the exploration concept and Manifest Destiny because it has 'more limted editorial latitude' than painting and exposes things that might not have been seen by the naked eye. There was a tendency to focus on the 'sublime' - the awesomeness of the landscape - the 'majesty of nature'. Adams refers to the 'implication of silence' (loc 2270).