Landscape photos that shrank the globe on view at W&M
Before the first landscape photographs began to appear in the mid- 1800s, the Earth was a much larger and far more mysterious place. Paintings, prints and written descriptions provided no more than approximate glimpses of what lay beyond the horizon. So the only way to experience any distant sight was to travel there and take a look for yourself.
No wonder, then, that the first pictures of Niagara Falls had such an astonishing effect when they began to circulate in the 1840s and '50s. Still more amazing were the earliest photographs of such extraordinary Western landmarks as the Yosemite Valley, the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone -- all of which were more alien to Americans of the 1860s and '70s than the surface of Mars to their 21st-century descendants.
So great was the impact of these pioneering images that Congress set aside Yosemite and Yellowstone in the nation's first embrace of environmental conservation. Investors, farmers, ranchers, loggers and other interests responded strongly to the pictures, too, producing a vast wave of immigrants eager to take advantage of the wide open spaces and seemingly unlimited natural resources.
But descriptions such as big, rich and wild only hint at the complexity of the brave new world portrayed in Williamsburg's Muscarelle Museum of Art, where "Eloquent Vistas: The Art of Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Photography from the George Eastman House Collection" runs through Jan. 8.
Looming beneath many of these spectacular vistas is the suggestion of an immense and irresistible power -- one that not only created this wondrous land but also blessed its future.
"Photography played a major role in the opening up of the West and the development of this country," says Jeanne Verhulst, associate curator of exhibitions at the George Eastman House.
"These photographs weren't just artistic interpretations. They were indisputable facts. And they brought a new reality -- a new veracity -- to the greatness and potential that people saw in the American West."
Drawn from the Eastman House's archive of more than 10,000 19th-century American landscape photographs, "Eloquent Vistas" reaches back to the very beginning of the genre, underscoring an attraction so strong that it often found ways to defy the early technical restrictions of the medium.
In 1855, for example, Platt D. Babbitt captured an unexpectedly intimate view of "Tourists Viewing Niagara Falls from Prospect Point" despite the maddening hypersensitivity of the daguerreotype process to both movement and outdoor light. Just how many other plates he spoiled in the attempt is left unanswered.
Photographers George N. Barnard, James Gardner, Alexander Gardner and Timothy O'Sullivan, similarly, encountered their own technical challenges when they used the slightly more forgiving albumen print process to record battlefield scenes during the Civil War. But the difficulties of dealing with the fragile glass plates, which had to be carefully prepared and developed in portable darkrooms, paled beside the task of defining the aesthetic rules of the landscape photo.
In shot after shot, many of these early photographers bowed to utility, speed and inexperience as they made seemingly artless, strictly reportorial records of such now legendary sites as Appomattox and Lookout Mountain. Within a few years, however, these surprisingly guileless images -- most of which appeared in photographic albums published after the war -- would give way to an astounding transformation in which the most accomplished landscape photos rivaled paintings as works of fine art.
"You wouldn't have called these photographers 'artists' during this time. They probably didn't think of themselves as artists, either," Muscarelle director Aaron De Groft says.
"But they began making decisions about composition and light and dark that changed what they did into art."
Not every early landscape photographer required such an apprenticeship before producing images of high artistic merit.
In 1861, a former storekeeper named Carlton E. Watkins made the first of seven photographic expeditions into the Yosemite Valley. The expertly composed mammoth-plate images with which he returned made both him and the majestic landscape he captured famous.
Equally gifted was William Bell, whose pioneering survey of the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River basin in the early 1870s resulted in some of the most powerful and influential landscapes ever captured in a photograph.
In "Canon of Kanab Wash, Looking South," for example, Bell placed his camera under a looming rock overhang, then looked across to a cliff face that towered so high it almost shut out the sky. What resulted was an extraordinary vantage point that underscored both the immense scale of the landscape and the diminutive, comparatively unimportant size of the viewer.