Print the Legend: Photography and the American West

by Martha A. Sandweiss

A compelling story of how the new medium of photography and the new American frontier came of age together—illustrated with scores of stunning images

This prize-winning book tells the intertwined stories of photography and the American West—a new medium and a new place that came of age together in the nineteenth century.

“Excellent . . . rewarding . . . a provocative look at the limits of photography as recorder of history—and its role in perpetuating myth.”—Chris Vognar, Dallas Morning News

“A sophisticated and engaging exploration of photography and the West . . . A really handsome work.”—James McWilliams, Austin Chronicle

“A wonderful book.”—Vernon Peter, Sunday Oregonian

“A deliciously intelligent new book . . . so engrossing you can’t stop reading.”—Michael More, Albuquerque Journal

“ Print the Legend belongs on that short shelf of essential books about the American West.”—James P. Ronda, University of Tulsa

Genres: History, Photography, Grad School, Nonfiction

402 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[Michele · Rating 3 out of 5]

 

 

Print the Legend: Photography and the American West

By Martha A. Sandweiss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002)

 

Martha Sandweiss’s beautifully illustrated Print the Legend describes the evolution of photographic technology, specifically in relation to the development of the American West.  During the nineteenth century, photography struggled to gain acceptance in the public sphere as a visual medium for narrating the story of the settlement of the West.  Imaging grew more sophisticated and photographers learned how to represent the West in ways that captured the American public’s attention. Meanwhile, railroads cut pathways through the remote landscape, enabling settlers to fill the space that was emptied of its Indians and to claim their Manifest Destiny.  Eventually, paper prints with accompanying written captions interpreted the Western scene and were able to be inserted into newspapers and magazines.  Photography finally found a niche in public discourse and began to shape viewers’ understanding of the West.  Just as the West had to be “won” for America, so photography had to earn the right to “print the legend” of the developing West during the nineteenth century.

Photographic history in the West begins with daguerreotype photographers capturing images of the Mexican-American War.  These men worked alongside lithographers, who were better able to romanticize the American victory and evoke nationalistic pride by embellishing scenes with patriotic symbols.  Entrepreneurs used daguerreotypes to capture early scenes of the West but were unable to compete with the scale and excitement of moving panoramas and live narration.  The federal government sent scouting expeditions, including photographers with bulky cameras, into the Western wilderness, only to sequester the resulting photographs in internal reports that never reached the public eye.  As photographic technology progressed to wet-plates, stereographs, and eventually film-loaded Kodak cameras, paper prints still struggled to compete with colored lithography for inclusion in type-set, printed materials and other venues that were intended for public consumption of images. 

            In addition to outlining the technical limitations of this burgeoning photographic technology in the rugged Western landscape, Sandweiss identifies two ways that the images were employed to control public perception of the West.  First, photographers had to create consumer demand for the images, which meant overcoming the perception of the medium as chiefly for private portraits.  Without acceptance by the public, there was no market for their product.  Sandweiss suggests that photographers wielded the power to craft American perceptions of the West as empty and historyless in order to “satisfy the economic agendas of their corporate patrons” (180).   The ancillary result was that Americans began to imagine the West as a place that could be conquered by settlement.  Second, the reproducibility of paper prints meant that the subject of the photograph lost control over the use of the image, as well as its interpretation.  Once captions were added to paper prints, and especially when half-tone prints were easily inserted into printed materials, photographers and editors controlled the message and meaning of the images.  One poignant example is the perpetuation of the vanishing Indian myth, which was reputedly substantiated by photographs of Indian ruins and accompanied by narratives extolling the Christianization of the formerly savage Indians as the nation expanded westward.

By limiting her focus to the American West, however, Sandweiss loses an opportunity to cast the region as an extension of the East Coast, which would provide a more satisfactory interpretation of the sluggardly acceptance of photography in the nineteenth century.  She faults the shortcomings of the medium, the photographers’ lack of visual acumen with the new technology and the lack of captions that interpret the prints for the viewers but fails to address the shift in East Coast consumer taste from images of sublime nature to urban spaces.  And  Sandweiss claims that the audience east of the Mississippi River was unable to interpret the bleak, Western landscapes dotted with occasional soldiers or Indians without the help of captions, which would only be available late in the century.   Instead, Sandweiss might have emphasized the work that captioned photographs performed in creating a new visual market that demanded crisp, realistic depictions of the uniquely American landscape.

            Of more concern is Sandweiss’s dismissive attitude toward the daguerreotype, a medium that she views as problematic because of its scale and inability to be captioned.  In her attempt to describe the concomitant development of the American West and photographic technology, she repeatedly describes the daguerreotypes as having only instrumental use.  Further, she blames the dearth of surviving plates on consumer preference for images that were “better and more effectively conveyed through other media” (120).  Whether disposed of after creating a panorama or critiqued as ineffective mimicry of the multi-paneled panorama, the daguerreotype loses its importance in the genealogy of photographic development because Sandweiss is chiefly interested in publicly viewable images that tell a story and have commercial value.  This narrow focus precludes the admittedly dominant acceptance of daguerreotype portraits in the West, as well as in the East, and the artists’ preference for daguerreotypes when creating the initial storyboards for the popular panoramas of the West.

            Sandweiss makes a compelling argument for the symbiotic development of photography and the American West and challenges scholars to consider photographs as important pieces of documentary evidence that provide clues to the past.  Photographers were eager to test their mettle in the newly opened West, exploring both the rugged landscape and the limits of their imaging equipment.  Whether working with chemical applications on silver plates, wet-prints from glass plates, or rolls of film, photographers seized the opportunity to provide Americans with a glimpse of their expanding nation.  By augmenting photographs with narrative interpretations of the West, photographers created national meaning that was conveyed to Americans who only had indirect access to the region through images.  Photographs of gold miners, railroad workers, Indians, pioneers, and the landscapes they altered now claim a place in the historical record that was created during the nineteenth-century settlement of the West. 

[Samuel · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Martha A. Sandweiss’ Print the Legend: Photography and the American West, the author introduces her book as “a story about photography and the American West, a new medium and a new place that came of age together in the nineteenth century” (2). In her introduction, Sandweiss clarifies that her book is not a comprehensive history of photography in the West, but rather, she narrows her scope of interest to an exploration of public photographs—those used for exhibition, publication, or sale—from the mid-1840s to the early 1890s that portray the West and shaped popular thinking about this mythical region of the North American continent. Her main argument centers on the assertion that despite the technological advancements of photography in the second half of the nineteenth century, the American public consistently preferred other two-dimensional pictorial images—namely paintings, prints, panoramas, sketches, and scientific drawings—of the West that offered more dramatic views with familiar nationalistic narratives. Although photographs may appear more precise than other mediums of visual representation, “they often seemed to be insufficiently informative, unable to depict what remained known or felt but ultimately unseen” (10). For these reasons, photos were not immediately triumphant in the visual marketplace of the nineteenth century.

In addition to her central thesis, Sandweiss also contends for photographs’ relevance and utility as primary sources for historical research. She acknowledges, however, that they need to be just as rigorously analyzed for bias as written sources. In order to demonstrate the importance of her methodology—using photographs to convey history—as well as to prove her central thesis concerning photography’s emergence and initial unpopularity in portraying the West, Sandweiss organizes her book into seven chapters that roughly break down into two parts. The first three chapters chronicle the daugerrean era of photography when private opportunists attempted and failed to use the new technology of photography to capture marketable images of the West during the Mexican American War and its bounteous resources following the War. The second part of her book’s organization includes four chapters that address the advancement of the wet-plate negative process used on late 1850s government exploring expeditions, the marketing of America’s economic future, the cataloguing of Native Americans, and the use of photographs in illustrated books to depict predictive tales of “the West that could be” (3). Through Sandweiss’ analysis of photographs and other visual materials—both those still existing and those that have since perished—in addition to traditional historic texts, she demonstrates the losing battles of the earliest photographs of the American West that would only find a place of respected value just before the turn of the century “as document and as art, as economic prospect and as political argument—in the cultural imaginings of [the West]” (4).

In the seventh chapter and epilogue of the book, “Western Photography and the Illustrated Book,” Sandweiss discusses the nineteenth century “gap between the technological capacity to convey certain sorts of visual information and the more conservative popular expectations for what images should look like” (324). In drawing from the 1962 film, John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), Sandweiss concludes that in resisting the realistic images of photography, nineteenth century Americans “chose to print the legend, not the fact” (324). In fact, in the epilogue to the book, Sandweiss clarifies that the West continued to be misrepresented by photography into the twentieth century with nostalgic photographs romanticizing cowboy life. In other words, the mythical West survives in reverse due to present day interpretations of nineteenth century photography. As Sandweiss concludes: “If, in the mid-nineteenth century, [photographs] seemed unable to alter Americans’ collective imagings of the West, they have come over time to inform and shape our master narrative of the nation’s western past and to fix it in the collective imagination” (343).

[Joy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Methodologically important for making the distinction between seeing photos both through and in history. For example, any given photo can be situated within its historical moment, with respect to that particular "period eye," but also the meaning of any given photo changes through time, making them very historically dynamic. Sandweiss' narrative carefully pulls apart the ways that photos of the west fed into a dominant narrative about the necessity for westward expansion into an area without a human history, and shows how modern historians who ignore the constructedness of this narrative (such as Ken Burns, which she discusses in the epilogue) feed into the presumptions such photos helped stabilize. I think Sandweiss strikes an excellent balance between acknowledging how a historian's interests are framed by the present and bringing to light historical evidence that challenges, complicates, and reveals the roots of dominant narratives about the west. In my book, that's one of the major goals of most good history. However, the first four chapters are redundant and boring unless you are really, really interested in daguerreotypes. I would recommend skimming them, and getting into the meat of the book which starts at chapter 5.

[Tasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wouldn't say I was entertained reading this book, but as a work of scholarship it's pretty damn amazing.

[Ron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read my review at my blog.