building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

the influence of nature. The illusory realism usually produced by large works fired
public curiosity and spread the values considered nowadays as ecological.
However, the sceneries of New England belonged to the artists, those of the West
were spaces privileged by photographers. Knowledge of the landscape of the
frontier was consolidated, in fact, by the technical evolution and by the introduction
of stereometric photography which, from halfway through the nineteenth century
onwards, began to support exploratory expeditions.
Thanks to their rapid diffusion, photographs were not restricted to scientific
documents or support for cartography, but became true means of communication
of an aesthetics, which presented the general public with the opportunity to
contemplate the conquest of the West through its landscape and fired the creation
of a national spirit. The partnership begun at the end of the 1860s between the
geologist Clarence King (1842‐1901) and the photographer Timothy O’Sullivan
(1840‐1882) during the expedition along one of the transcontinental routes to
territories between the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains, was indicative of
what has been said so far. O’Sullivan’s photographs not only removed the symbolic
world of maps from an arbitrary interpretation, but above all they made all the
operations to give the explored territories precise and immediately verifiable
topographical names. They also became a useful tool to divulge the results of the
expeditions. The realism of the photograph, capable of rapidly immortalising the
subject from different viewpoints, gave the observer an emotional charge which
gave the illusion of the journey.
Furthermore, the tragic nature represented by some landscape aspects of the
territories that had been crossed increased interest in the Wild West, and even fired
some popular catastrophic convictions about the origin of the world.
The vision of wide landscapes certainly influenced those who were in direct contact,
but it probably influenced even more strongly those who had never had a chance of
living at the frontier and of going through the anguish of the precarious existence
transmitted by an environment, which had, until a short time before, been
uncontaminated.
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