The Sublime and the Banal in Postwar Photography of the American West

Abstract

Until the mid-twentieth century, American photographs cast the West as a place apart, distinguished from the rest of the United States by its empty sweep of frontier territory and its stupendous heights of untouched grandeur. Ansel Adams exercised a virtual monopoly over sublime views of the pristine landscape in the modern era. However, in 1960 Adams and Nancy Newhall co-edited This is the American Earth, published by the Sierra Club, warning that the awe-inspiring landscape memorialized by Adams risked disappearing in an age of human-made development and destruction best exemplified by the growth of Los Angeles. At the same time, in the 1960s and 1970s younger photographers, most notably Ed Ruscha and Robert Adams, began to challenge the older photographer’s exalted vision of nature and the environmental assumptions that underpinned it. These artists’ photographic books, by dispassionately documenting the suburban structures mushrooming across the American southwest, complicated the apparent dichotomy b...