Category: Wilderness

We know very little about Timothy O’Sullivan’s beginnings as a photographer, or, indeed, his life at all. He began his career working in the portrait studio of Mathew Brady, and then was one of Brady’s team of photographic “operators” on the battlefields of the Civil War. Although his work is greatly admired today as, in the words of photography historian Keith Davis, “the paradigmatic expression of American landscape or expeditionary photography in that era,” in his own lifetime O’Sullivan’s role was that of a workman who fulfilled his assignments of documenting utilitarian subjects.[footnote]Keith F. Davis, “Representing the West: From Lewis and Clark to the Great Surveys of 1867-79,” in Keith F. Davis and Jane L. Aspinwall eds., Timothy O’Sullivan: The King Survey Photographs (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), p. 14.[/footnote] Nevertheless, his mastery of his craft and his personal vision elevated his work above that of his contemporaries.

In 1867, O’Sullivan was selected for the Fortieth Parallel Survey led by Clarence King. Over the course of three years, O’Sullivan photographed landscapes and geological formations, factories and towns, mines, group portraits of the survey team, and strange views that Davis has called “sophisticated meditations on his own role as witness and recorder.”[footnote]Keith F. Davis, “Representing the West: From Lewis and Clark to the Great Surveys of 1867-79,” in Keith F. Davis and Jane L. Aspinwall eds., Timothy O’Sullivan: The King Survey Photographs (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), p. 73[/footnote] The results of the survey were published in seven text volumes and two atlases, with lithographs made after O’Sullivan’s photographs illustrating some of the texts; however, few photographic prints were made. A small number of photographs on official survey mounts was issued by the survey, and in 1876 a set of 180 prints was produced in an edition of six in conjunction with the Philadelphia Centennial exhibition. Miscellaneous prints and stereographs were made through the 1880s, but there is no evidence that these were available for purchase.

O’Sullivan’s The Old Trapper (also titled Upper Bear River, Utah) was made in 1869 as part of the King Survey. Unlike his views of mining towns and railroads, which look forward to expanding settlement in the region, The Old Trapper casts a nostalgic look back to the early days of the frontier, when fur trapping led intrepid mountain men to the West. After the fur trade peaked in the early 1830s, many former trappers became trail guides for settlers.

This photograph was probably staged, perhaps even as a joke. One copy has a pencil notation on the mount, “Munger as Squaw?”[footnote]Keith F. Davis, “Representing the West: From Lewis and Clark to the Great Surveys of 1867-79,” in Keith F. Davis and Jane L. Aspinwall eds.,Timothy O’Sullivan: The King Survey Photographs (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), catalogue raisonné no. 145.[/footnote] Painter Gilbert Munger joined the King survey as a guest artist in 1869, and he may have posed as the nearly illegible “trapper” figure on the right. Printed on the mount of the Middlebury College Museum’s copy of the photograph is the notation “to the right can be seen the Old Trapper’s home,” although this home is simply a rough tarp mounted on poles similar to one seen in other photographs of the survey team. As the frontier was quickly diminishing and the wilderness giving way to farms and towns, perhaps the old trapper photograph satirized the olden days that preceded the current era of progress.

Niagara Falls comprises three waterfalls that straddle the border between the United States and Canada. The falls were formed at the end of the last ice age, when the north polar cap covered most of Canada in a huge sheet of ice. As the ice receded, its melt water pooled into the Great Lakes, and through erosion the falls were formed.

Aboriginal peoples discovered Niagara Falls thousands of years ago, and by the early 1600s Iroquoian and other tribes settled the Niagara peninsula. Following the War of 1812, the region rapidly developed. In the face of economic exploitation by tourism, hydropower, and manufacturing, the Niagara Reservation was created in 1883 as the first state park, marking an early triumph for the conservation movement.

From their initial encounters with Niagara Falls, Europeans and their American descendants stood in awe in front of this natural spectacle, admiring its sublime evidence of the powers of the Divine in nature. With the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, Niagara Falls became easily accessible to tourists who brought back souvenirs of their visit to this wonderful place. By the 1850s, these souvenirs included photographs.

Platt D. Babbit, an early photographer who used the daguerreotype process, controlled the lucrative pavilion area known as Point View on the American side of the Falls. Babbitt chased off competitors who also wished to set up photographic businesses at the pavilion. “Mr. Babbitt and his forces would stand between the camera and the falls swinging large-sized umbrellas to and fro thus preventing [the other photographer] from getting a picture,” wrote an observer.[footnote]http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/artists/2800/platt-d-babbitt-american-1823-1879/. Accessed 11/10/16.[/footnote]

Although Babbitt would often photograph tourists without their knowledge, later selling them their daguerreotypes as keepsakes, in this example two well-dressed couples seem carefully posed. Frozen in a kind of tableau vivant, the figures are in profile and the woman on the left carefully holds her parasol away from her face. For the multi-second exposure, they hold themselves rigidly still as the flowing water blurs behind them.

In 1851, Frederick Scott Archer invented a new photographic process to replace one-of-a-kind daguerreotypes on metal that were popular for portraits and multiple but imprecise calotypes made from paper negatives. The new process produced a clear negative on transparent glass that could be used to print multiple prints on paper. As its name implies, exposure and development of the negative had to be done within a ten-minute time frame while the light sensitive chemicals were wet, requiring photographers to bring portable darkrooms into the field. Although the process was capable of rendering fine detail within the shadows, the chemicals were sensitive only to blue light, making it impossible to render cloud-filled skies without exposing a separate negative only for the clouds. Because practical techniques for enlarging were not yet available, the glass negatives had to be the size of the finished print.

To achieve a large, or “mammoth,” print, a photographer required a glass negative of the same size, as well as a camera big enough to hold it. Thus photographing in places that were difficult to reach, like Yosemite Valley, meant hiking difficult terrain with mules loaded down with equipment, finding a source for water to rinse chemicals from plates, and a place to pitch a dark tent for working with poisonous and flammable materials. The sticky collodion solution would be carefully poured onto the clean glass, placed and exposed in the camera, developed in the dark, and finally fixed. Exposures required several seconds to several minutes, depending on the available light and the sensitivity of the chemicals.

Once a photographer had completed work in the field to obtain glass negatives, back in the studio prints were made using paper with light-sensitive materials suspended in a solution of albumen, or egg white. These prints would then be adhered to a thick cardboard mount to keep from curling.

Eliot Porter took up color photography at a time when it was widely considered “too literal,” and thus unsuitable for artistic images. His book, In Wildness is the Preservation of the World, marked a turning point in the acceptance of fine art color photography. The book was the first of many color books that the Sierra Club would publish by a variety of artists, and the first of twenty-five monographs of color photos Porter would produce.

Porter taught himself black and white camera and darkroom techniques while he was a teenager, and by the later 1930s he was a master printer with a growing reputation. In 1939 he took up color photography, which he focused on almost exclusively by the 1950s. He learned Kodak’s complicated dye transfer color printing process, which afforded great control over hues and produced stable color prints. Starting in 1962, he also used professional printers to make his prints, which he would then mount and spot.

Porter used a medium format view camera designed to hold 4 x 5 inch sheets of film, mounted on a tripod. To photograph birds, a beloved subject, he used a system of strobe lights. He would typically spend several hours composing the scene.

The Dye Transfer process enabled him to make full-color prints from film exposed in camera. From the original color film, three inter-negatives are exposed through red, green, and blue filters. From these separation negatives, gelatin reliefs capable of absorbing dyes in exact proportion to the densities of the negatives are made. The matrices are then dyed in the complementary colors, cyan, magenta, and yellow, and applied to the paper in exact register, along with highlight and shadow masks. The acid of the dyes migrate to the base of the paper, resulting in the final print.

In 1964, the United States Congress passed the Wilderness Act, which established a national wilderness preservation system composed of federally owned areas designated by Congress as “wilderness areas.” The Act defined wilderness as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” With panoramas of glowing mountain ranges and thundering waterfalls devoid of any human presence, the photographs of Ansel Adams have come to represent the epitome of wilderness imagery.

By the early 1970s, however, a younger generation of photographers that included Robert Adams (no relation), Frank Gohlke, Joe Deal, Lewis Baltz and others began to take issue with this notion of nature. Deriding Ansel Adams’ views of Yosemite as “sappy” (Deal’s word) and Romantic, they photographed grain elevators, suburban housing developments at the base of mountain ranges, urban architecture and parking lots featured in the New Topographics exhibition at the George Eastman House in 1975.

In more recent decades, scholars have re-evaluated the very notion of wilderness, arguing that the concept of uninhabited, pristine nature itself is a complex cultural construction that ignores the native peoples who had lived on “wilderness” lands for centuries, as well as privileging human beings over other forms of life. Moreover, critics argue that fetishizing distant wild locales absolves us of concern for places and marginalized people  closer to home. As historian William Cronon wrote in 1995, “wilderness embodies a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural,” adding “to the extent that we live in an urban-industrial civilization but at the same time pretend to ourselves that our real home is in the wilderness, to just that extent we give ourselves permission to evade responsibility for the lives we actually lead.”[footnote]William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” in Carolyn Merchant, Major Problems in American Environmental History, 2^nd ed. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005), 385-86.[/footnote]

A number of photographers working today who are represented in this exhibition, including Nigerian photographer George Osodi, have replaced the idealized wilderness with the realities of environmental degradation. While earlier photographers such as Ansel Adams used their work to argue for wilderness conservation, contemporary photographers like Osodi document issues confronting us directly.

The daguerreotype process, named for its French inventor, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, was one of the first forms of photography. Images were exposed in-camera on sensitized metal plates coated with a thin layer of highly-polished silver, then developed, fixed, and mounted in protective cases. Since no negatives were used, daguerreotypes are one-of-a-kind images.

Between 1839 and the early 1850s, the heyday of the medium, daguerreotypes were used primarily to make studio portraits. Sitters posed with their heads held still by metal braces and their hands perched on the arms of chairs or holding objects like books. Because of the bulky equipment, complicated process, and long exposure times, outdoor scenes were much less common. Despite the difficulty of viewing an image on a mirrored surface, daguerreotypes were valued for their amazing detail.

In 1839, the invention of photo very different photographic processes was announced to the world. The daguerreotype, invented by Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, was a unique image on a metal plate coated with mirrored silver. Although the process was capable of rendering precise detail, the metal surface and lack of negative to make prints limited it as a practical photographic process. The calotype, perfected by William Henry Fox Talbot, was a negative/positive process that produced multiple prints on paper, but the paper negatives used resulted in fuzzy prints lacking fine detail.

In 1851, the wet-plate collodion process was developed. It combined aspects of both the daguerreotype and the calotype. Light sensitive chemicals suspended in sticky collodion could be poured on metal plates to produce single tintypes, or on glass to produce negatives from which prints could be made. The collodion was only light sensitive while wet, which required the exposing and developing to happen within about a ten-minute period. Prints made from glass negatives had the fine detail of a daguerreotype, as well as the calotype’s potential for multiple prints. During the second half of the nineteenth century, photographic paper was coated with egg whites to bind photographic chemicals to the paper. Durable prints could be made in large numbers, although the thin paper’s tendency to curl required prints to be mounted to a cardboard backing. Because the chemicals used in making wet-plate collodion negatives were sensitive only to blue light, a sky with clouds was almost impossible to photograph. Landscape photographers often worked around this limitation by using multiple negatives to make a single print – one exposed for the land and another for the sky.

Before the first non-native people entered Yosemite Valley in 1849, it was home to a Native American tribe known as the Ahwahneechee, who lived in the region for over 3000 years. In the mid-nineteenth century, the United States army drove them out of what we now call Yosemite National Park. One of the first white settlers to make his home in the valley was Galen Clark. Clark established a hotel for visitors in the Mariposa Grove, home to the Giant Sequoia trees.

In 1861 the most important early photographer to visit the Yosemite region, Carleton Watkins, had a mammoth camera constructed to hold 18 x 22 inch glass plate negatives. Entering the valley with a twelve-mule pack train, he not only brought his camera and glass plates but also chemicals, a portable darkroom, and other equipment, including a camera designed to take small paired photographs called stereographs. These would be viewed through a special stereoscope that would merge the two images into one with the illusion of three-dimensional depth. Together with his mammoth plate photographs, Watkins’ stereographs helped raise public awareness about the wonders of Yosemite Valley.

Watkins returned multiple times to the valley in 1861, and again in 1865 and 1866 while working for the California State Geological Survey. Although his stereographs only provided Anglicized names for landscape features, his mammoth plate photographs frequently gave both the Ahwahneechee and the English versions of places with titles such as Piwyac, the Vernal Fall and Pompompasos, the Three Brothers.

Partly on the evidence of Watkins’ extraordinary photographs, in 1864 Abraham Lincoln signed a bill declaring the valley protected, paving the way for the national Parks system. Other photographers soon made their way to Yosemite. Eadweard Muybridge, better known for his studies of human and animal locomotion, photographed the region in 1867 and again in 1872. Using the long exposures required by the technology of the day, early photographers pictured rivers as smooth surfaces and waterfalls and blurred flowing water.

In 1890, an act of Congress created Yosemite National Park. With the completion of the Yosemite Valley Railroad in 1907, tourists began visiting the area in droves. Among them was the fourteen-year-old Ansel Adams, who roamed the valley taking snapshots with a Kodak box camera. In 1927, Adams would produce his first important series of Yosemite photographs, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras. Adams would continue to photograph Yosemite for the rest of his career, producing the iconic wilderness photographs that established his reputation as the best-known American landscape photographer of the twentieth century.