October 12 - October 18, 1995

HOW THE WEST WAS SHOT: Just after the Civil War, says art history professor Keith McElroy, a nation "licking its wounds decided to go West, as an escape from its memories."

Starting in the 1870s, McElroy says, O'Sullivan, William Henry Jackson, John K. Hillers and others accompanied scientific expeditions manned by geologists, botanists and hydrologists. They were on missions commissioned by Congress to help "open up" the West to settlement by mapping it out and locating vital resources. The photographers, dragging along bulky equipment and portable darkrooms, recorded the geological wonders of this uncharted territory for the folks back home.

And just as the Civil War photographers' images are enduring icons of mayhem and madness, so are the expedition pictures. These finely rendered black-and-white pictures of the Grand Canyon's rock walls, of ancient cliff dwellings, of Utah's dry, bare flats remain some of the most beautiful images of the West ever created. These early expedition photographs, in fact, have become a standard by which generations of photographers have measured themselves.

"Every photographer has to come here and try themselves against these images," says McElroy, "whether they publish them or not."

McElroy is a sprightly figure who relishes the variety of teaching both studio drawing and art history at the UA--"This morning we printed our feet on charcoal pads!" he says with delight one recent noon hour in his office. Next Wednesday evening he'll kick off the Arizona Historical Society's new lecture series on photography in Arizona.

Southwest Images: The Photographers' Legacy is a five-lecture package timed to coincide roughly with a new exhibition and book called The Buehman Studio: Tucson in Focus, written by Evelyn Cooper and published by the society. McElroy's premier slide lecture will focus on the expedition photographers. Subsequent talks by other speakers will cover C.S. Fly, the photog who traveled with the general who captured Geronimo, the Depression-era photographers who recorded rural poverty and the influence of Arizona Highways magazine.

The final lecture, by well-known Arizona photographer Mark Klett, will circle back to the expedition photographers. Klett and others have undertaken a "rephotographic survey project," in which they found the original vantage points of the expeditioners and took new photographs of the same places.

McElroy says the expedition photographers were part of a long history of pictorial documentation.

"All expeditions sent into the West always took artists," McElroy explains. "But earlier on they were doing hand-rendering. Lewis and Clark, for instance, took along a silhouette cutter for ethnographic portraits."

By the 1870s and 1880s, photography was the medium of choice, mostly because it was believed to offer an objective, faithful view of reality. The photographers mostly considered themselves technicians, but like their contemporaries, from painters to geologists, they believed that "nature was the other book of God," as McElroy puts it. Emulating the landscape painters, they tried to render what they saw as sublime in the land.

"William Henry Jackson's 'Mount of the Holy Cross' became the most famous photograph of the West," McElroy says. Taken in the Rockies, it captured a natural cross rising up in the mountains. "That photograph became a religious icon, a Protestant image."

Jackson, O'Sullivan, Hillers and the others didn't win the stature of artists until Beaumont Newhall organized an influential show in 1942 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. By then, modernism was in full sway and it judged their pictures not sublime but elegant and spare. The new visual language the photographers invented can be attributed in part to their equipment, McElroy says.

Their early-model cameras presented the images to them upside down, so when they peered through their lenses underneath their black cloths they saw inverted, abstract compositions of planes and shapes. O'Sullivan's picture of Canyon de Chelly has no horizon line, no cute little children, no allusions to God: It's a sheer rock wall covering the whole paper, divided into passages of light and dark and exquisitely rendered texture. To us, it has the same aesthetic as modernist painting.

And, McElroy says, the photographers were looking with virgin eyes at landscapes they had never before imagined.

"In the Rockies, there were some picturesque scenes," McElroy notes. "But what do you do with the Utah flats or the Arizona desert? They had to invent a new vision."

Southwest Images: The Photographers' Legacy begins with a slide lecture by Keith McElroy at 7 p.m. Wednesday, October 18, at the Arizona Historical Society, 949 E. Second St. Lectures continue at 7 p.m. Wednesdays through November 15. For more information call 628-5774.
--Margaret Regan

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