Western Landscape Photography: Then and Now

Abstract

Rachel McLean Sailor explores the history of photography and its role in place-making in the West, while engaging examples of contemporary photography that “can respond anew to a singular moment, and a singular place, while simultaneously encompassing the deep history of its subject matter medium, and the cultural history of all who have attempted such representations in the past.” Readers are guided through a number of photographs from the past as well as contemporary examples from the Oregon Historical Society's exhibit, Place: Framing the Oregon Landscape. This exhibit essay touches “on the many ways that the artists in this exhibit are responding not only to place, but also to the histories of landscape and how photographic styles and conceptual approaches have rapidly transformed in America from the 1840s to today.”