Revisiting the American West

 

 

 

During graduate school I had the luck to go on a field trip to Fort Worth’s Amon Carter Museum of Art and see original prints from In The American West.  In 1979. Richard Avedon was commissioned by the museum to produce an encyclopedic series of portraits.  Avedon was the preeminent American photographer, a New Yorker, successful in commercial photography and portraits, was hired to collect images of a region filled with myths.  Such projects were not new to photography, but the images he created were innovative.

Focusing on the rural West, Avedon visited ranches and rodeos, but he also went to truck stops, oil fields, and slaughterhouses. Rather than playing to the western myths of grandeur and space, he sought out people whose appearance and life circumstances were the antithesis of mythical images of the ruggedly handsome cowboy, dashing outdoor adventurer, or beautiful pioneer wife. The subjects he chose for the portraits were ordinary people, coping daily with personal cycles of boom and bust.

 from the Stanford University Cantor Arts Center press release on the 20^th anniversary tour of the exhibit

           The United States Geological Survey was created to document the lands the nation wanted to occupy and settle to illustrate its resources.  Photographers such as Timothy O’Sulliavn and Carleton Watkins documented the ‘unspoiled’ riches of the West for the survey.  Eadweard Muyerbridge, an Englishman who came to the American West for the Gold Rush in 1855, after a stagecoach accident became a photographer and documented Yosemite Valley, San Francisco, the Tlingit people of Alaska, and the Modoc War of 1873.  John Pierpoint Morgan, the financier, commissioned Edward Curtis, in 1906, to produce the twenty volume collection, The North American Indian, to capture the ‘vanishing race’, a phrase Curtis used and manipulated.

Ed Ruscha, an Oklahoman, undertook Twenty Six Gasoline Stations in 1962 to report on his trips back and forth between Los Angeles where he was studying art and his home in Oklahoma City.

I had a vision that I was a great reporter when I did the gasoline stations.  I drove back to Oklahoma all the time, five or six times a year.  And I felt there so much wasteland between L.A. and Oklahoma City that somebody had to bring in the news to the city.  It was just a simple, straightforward way of getting the news and bringing it back.  I think it’s one of the best ways of just laying down the facts of what is out there.  …  It’s nothing more than a training manual for people who want to know about things like that.

Edward Ruscha in Edward Ruscha Photographer
 

There has been this great yearning of Americans to try to understand what is out there in the vast, wide open, relatively unexplored West.  Americans no longer expected the West to be Indians surrounding a stagecoach.  Instead, at that time, the West was station wagons at gas stations trying to get to national parks or moving out to California for opportunity.  Americans still have a love of nature and try to preserve ‘unspoiled’ land for the future.
 

              1974’s The New West started an investigation of the West’s ‘development’ for Robert Adams, who lives in Colorado.

“Many have asked, pointing incredulously toward a sweep of tract homes and billboards, why picture that? The question sounds simple, but it implies a difficult issue—why open our eyes anywhere but in undamaged places like national parks?…

Paradoxically, however, we also need to see the whole geography, natural and man-made, to experience a peace; all land, no matter what has happened to it, has over it a grace, an absolutely persistent beauty.”

Robert Adams, 1974

Adams incorporated the expansive American population onto the landscape of the continent that had been claimed.  Now, the land was not unspoiled or unharmed, but showed how the westward expansion had altered the West.

To me, an American Indian photographer from the West (born in Kansas, reservation in Oklahoma, and schooled on the West Coast) there is a fascination with the West, of appreciation of the land and a sense of what has become of it, stewardship.  My Indian forefathers back in the 19^th century would have never ventured out to the West Coast or dreamed of flying above the land at 35,000 feet, way above the tallest mountains.  They comprehended the world in a different cosmological way of thinking and considered the West to be the Land of the Setting Sun, both death and yet also, an unforeseen future.

The view from a commercial airliner, flying higher than an eagle soars, takes individuals out of the viewing and yet the presence or lack thereof is always there.  Canyons, bodies of water, mountains, forests, and cities became the scale of the subjects.  The colors of striations of minerals, erosion, and vegetation became paintbrush strokes.  Roads and quarries were the scars incised into the earth.  Wind power turbines and human habitations populated the landscape like acne outbreaks.  Things that could not be viewed from a land-based angle became apparent.  Observations from land, straight on visuals, were impossible from above.  I both admired nature and saw the results of man’s impact on it.

 

 The route was not decided by me.  Instead, the pilot was on a certain route devised by the airline, cruising at a standard altitude.  I just chose what I pointed my camera at, choosing from the vastness of the region available.  I chose areas that illustrated beauty, solitude, desolation, and man’s impact.  Some would like to turn the hands of time back, a futile academic exercise as the sun goes forward to the West, not back to the East, and one must look towards and prepare for the new day, thus is the wisdom of my Osage ancestors instructed to us every June during our Summer Dances.