Many Wests: Photographic Images of Western Peoples

Abstract

E s s a y R e v i e w M a n y W e s t s : P h o t o g r a p h i c Im a g e s o f W e s t e r n P e o p l e s E l i z a b e t h H u t c h i n s o n W o r k s R e v ie w e d Susan Bemardin, Melody Graulich, Lisa MacFarlane, and Nicole Tonkovich. Trading Gazes: Euro-American Women Photographers and Native North Americans, 1880-1940. Afterword by Louis Owens. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003. 240 pages, $60.00/$30.00. Anthony Lee. Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. 347 pages, $45.00. Martha A. Sandweiss. Print the Legend: Photography and the American West. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002. 402 pages, $39.95/$25.00. My essay title comes from Chon Noriega’s catalogue essay for the 1995 exhibition From the West: Chicano Narrative Photography, an important early attempt to provide a pictorial contribution to “New Western History” (9). Noriega uses the “New West” to describe work that critiques the traditional Western as a celebration of heroic, individual struggle by the Anglo on the frontier, masking the relationship between such narratives and American nation-state formation. Among other things, scholars of the New West focus on the cultural complex­ ity of a region that was viewed by only some of its occupants as a “fron­ tier.” The books under review here offer important explorations of this history as it was shaped by and reflected in pictures. The authors each have a different focus, and each book locates itself within a particular discipline, giving them different notions of how to use visual materials. Their common ground is the task of decoding visual representations, particularly photographs, by members of diverse ethnic groups, and the light each sheds on this issue is the focus of this review. The “Old West” is, as several books and museum exhibitions of the 1990s pointed out, the result of images— the iconic paintings of George Catlin, Albert Bierstadt, and Thomas Moran and the films of Holly­ wood directors who followed them.1 A s Martha Sandweiss points out, E l iz a b e t h H u t c h i n s o n 3 3 5 “N o part of the American historical imagination is so shaped by visual imagery as its image of the nineteenth-century West” (11). Numerous writers, including Sandweiss, A lan Trachtenberg, Sandra Phillips, and Peter Bacon Hales, have noted photography’s contributions to this process.2 Print the Legend argues that photography and the West came of age at the same time, and their fates are irrevocably linked. But if photography primarily served the needs of the dominant culture, the medium’s inexpensiveness, reproducibility, and conceptual accessibility also gave it meaning for people negotiating a relationship with the mainstream. If photographs of the western landscape helped envision a space that was both the location and the ideological representation of America’s future, photographs of the people who lived there established the roles to be played by different groups. A s Jennifer A. González points out in the From the West catalogue, “The peoples of the W est... construct their relations of identity around being an image for, or having an image of, each other” (19). This insight reminds us that what might be called “m odem ” identity— an alienated sense of self impacted by the economic and political conditions of a high capitalist era and inte­ grated into ideologies of race and gender— came of age alongside the West and the visual medium that thrived there. The books reviewed help us see the modernity of both models and sitters. In the 1990s, there was an explosion of books and exhibitions that invited modem Westerners, especially Native Americans, to revisit photographs from the nineteenth and early twentieth century, pio­ neered by Theresa Harlan and Lucy Lippard.3 This scholarship mixes a sophisticated discussion of photography’s contribution...