Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work Jackson J. Benson
About: This article is published in Pacific Historical Review.The article was published on 1997-11-01. It has received 1 citations till now.
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that photography's apparent transcription of reality proved to be an immensely valuable asset for one enterprise in particular: tourism, and they explore those concerns and tensions surrounding photographic representations of landscape and the practices that created those representations during the so-called golden age in the late nineteenth century.
Abstract: Critical readings of landscape representations have become standard fare for cultural geographers in recent years. Nuanced and provocative work by scholars on both sides of the Atlantic have demonstrated the importance of landscape imagery for the historical-geographical interpretation of social ideologies, of individual meaning, and of the complex web of power relations (Cosgrove and Daniels 1988; Shortridge 1989; Duncan 1990; Daniels 1993; Wyckoff and Nash 1994; Domosh 1996; Wallach 1997; Cosgrove 1998). But while analyses of literary texts, paintings, and garden designs have established the fruitfulness of the iconographic approach to landscape, photography has remained curiously peripheral.(1) Scholars in cognate fields like sociology (Lutz and Collins 1993), anthropology (Edwards 1992; Faris 1996), cultural history (Stange 1989; Trachtenberg 1989), and, especially, art history (Snyder 1981; Hales 1984; Krauss 1985; Sandweiss 1991b; Bright 1992) have been less reluctant to assess landscape photographs as primary sources, rather than as mere illustrations. But here too a critical engagement with photographs not as pictures or documents but as social texts, as a discursive medium, has come only of late (Tuan 1979; Sandweiss 1991a, xiii). One reason has to do with the nature of photography itself. Photographs of geographical phenomena, when compared with other media, seem objective, true, and uncluttered by the whims of artists or the dictates of ideology. Born in the Victorian era from the seemingly perfect marriage of science and art, photography appeared to be the ideal medium for nature to copy herself with utter accuracy and exactitude (Freund 1980; Marien 1997; Ryan 1997); indeed, the notion that a photograph repeats its original, that it is less a copy than a simulacrum, remains with us (Trachtenberg 1991). The conventional idea of photography's infallibility is not a demonstrable truth, however, but a belief held with the irrational conviction of myth. It is the very persistence of this popularly held idea in the face of counterevidence that makes it so interesting, for the depth of conviction implies that landscape photography's myth of verisimilitude speaks to deeply felt concerns and tensions. In this essay I explore those concerns and tensions surrounding photographic representations of landscape - and the practices that created those representations - during the medium's so-called golden age in the late nineteenth century (Naef and Wood 1975). My central argument rests on three assertions revolving around landscape or view photography's signal importance in the Gilded Age. First, as part of a more general Victorian "search for order" during a period of radical social and economic unrest, photographic views refracted an ideology of human control over nature in their creation of a new, middle-class, postfrontier space (Wiebe 1967; Trachtenberg 1982). Nature became picturesque scenery and serviceable for mass-produced inspiration. Second, nature's scenic transformation was succinctly accomplished by photography - a superb vehicle of cultural mythology. As it presents a thoroughly convincing illusion of factuality while providing a repertoire of techniques that enable a photographer to make a powerful statement, the medium is uniquely positioned to naturalize cultural constructions. Complex ideas of progress, development, and regional transformation may be presented as laws of nature, as incontrovertible facts. Third, I shall argue that photography's apparent transcription of reality proved to be an immensely valuable asset for one enterprise in particular: tourism. Acquiring photographs gives shape to travel as it informs what the viewer should see, how it should be seen, and when it should be seen - all in a matter-of-fact and seemingly "unmediated" way (Sontag 1977, 9-10; MacCannell 1989, 45; Urry 1990, 138-140). These "pre-texts" as Joan Schwartz has argued recently, not only dictate the subject matter of travel photographs but become one component of a cycle that unites itineraries, representations, and the landscape itself (1996). …
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