Meaningful Places: Nineteenth-Century Photography and the Local Landscapes of the American West

As the early history of photography in America coincided with the Euro-American settlement of the West, the frontier, as Euro-Americans perceived it, offered photographers what seemed like an endless source of subject matter; photographs of Native Americans and landscapes became choice consumer items-for entertainment, for documentation, and for booster material that helped spur western immigration and tourism. However, most photographers in the West were going to great lengths to produce images for their local communities. For settlers, these images were not mere entertainment, but an important means through which they came to understand their new home. Images of their surroundings helped them shape and reshape the meaning of the landscape according to their own cultural imaginings. Photographs could teach residents about where they lived, by revealing nearby sites of natural wonder and local ecological, geological, and ethnographic history. Images could also help them to adjust to their new circumstances by visibly recording the development of a place-revealing domestication, alteration, and improvement, according to Euro-American sensibilities. Western photography was more than simply a documentary tool, however. The medium was also an interpretive vehicle, both for us today as we look back with the benefit of hindsight, and for the photographers themselves and their immediate clients and audiences as they sought to come to terms with their surroundings. This dissertation explores the cultural complexity, not only of photography, but also of western places, and regional socio-political concerns. It also elucidates the inherent tension between the immigrant and Native American views of the land.