Harlow Seminar - July 25, 2024, Rachel Sailor

When the cameras came: Photography and the American West
Speaker: Rachel Sailor, University of Wyoming
Time: Thursday, July 25, 5:30pm MT, talk begins at 6:30pm MT
Location: UW-NPS Research Station at the AMK Ranch, in the Berol Lodge
Abstract
Photographs of the Old West typically meet with a mixture of nostalgia, historical reverence, and pride of place for Western Americans, indeed most Americans. The aesthetics of these photographs, however, are more about tropes than truth. They illustrated a centuries-old practice of depicting places through compositions and techniques codified in seventeenth-century European painting. Yet, what about the camera’s reputation for delivering infallible veracity and for being a dispassionate intercessor between one time and place and another? What landscape aesthetics were inherited and naturalized by the camera? How do we “read” the visual rhetoric of the Old West? How do centuries-old aesthetic conventions still direct our looking and seeing of the landscape? Historical Western photographs carry an undeniable charm but are far more complex than usually recognized.
Speaker Bios
Rachel Sailor is a professor of art history and American studies at the University of Wyoming. Her research interests include the history of photography, landscape studies, and regional cultural production. She has published two books on photography of the American West and is working on a third.