 Photography and the American West came of age together, so as European Americans were exploring and moving into the West in even greater numbers in the 1840s, 1850s and just after the Civil War, they were lucky enough to have their disposal, the camera. And this has given us a unique insight into how a world that had been unchanged for thousands of years, and obviously it was populated for thousands of years, could be absolutely, well, changed beyond all recognition within the space of just a few hundred. The book we're talking about today is this one, it's called Into the Sunset and it says Photography's Image of the American West. And this was a catalog, it is a catalog that was put out by MoMA in around about 2009 I think, about an exhibition where they were looking at that history of the American West told through photographs, so about 150 years worth of images. And it was, I was really excited to get it because I quite like the American West, I like the mythology around it, you know, the base mythology of cowboys and all that kind of stuff, the western sort of feel, if you like. And I thought, well, this will be a book full of just these kind of photographs and how wrong I was. The first page is a triptych of three images by Ansel Adams, Midler White and then Stephen Shaw. And it's interesting to see these photographs because you look at the two, the Ansel Adams and the Midler White images and they are very much a landscape. They are a landscape that says, come and look at this landscape, come and join, see the wildness rather of the area, right? It's raw, it's untouched, it's nature in its most basic state. And then you compare that with a photograph that Stephen Shaw took about 20 years later, where the landscape itself, while the landscape, I would love to be in that landscape, it's got a wide open sky, it's got those dusty roads, you know, those, those telegraph poles and stuff that go off to the horizon, they promise so much more. But in the middle of this is a billboard saying, look, there's somewhere even better you could actually probably go and look at. So it's a picture of a, of a snow capped mountain. And the billboard itself is kind of broken down. And I love this idea that whoever laid out this book is choosing to juxtapose these three photographs because what they're sort of saying is that look, you know, this is how people's perceptions of the West have changed so quickly. In that early period of expansion, the European Americans were sort of driven by this idea of wanting to have part of that manifest destiny sort of feel going on. And a part of the photography of that time, it has an almost propaganda sort of feel to it because the photographs are real. We can see quite clearly this is a real place, but they are constructed in a way that says, look, there's nobody here. This is quite nice and gentle. This is, this is yours for the taking. It fits into the narrative that was around at the time, which was sort of saying, look, you know, these photographs suit what we're trying to say. And it's interesting that I would never have considered prior to this that landscape photography can be a tool for propaganda, but here it quite clearly is. In these early photographs of the West, you see a huge sense of scale that in a lot of them, you get a feeling that this is a landscape that is unlike anything that you would have seen up until this point. So if you put it, if you think about the eyes of somebody in that kind of 1870s, 1890s sort of turn of the century period where they wouldn't have seen, you know, the world on television, these photographs give that sense of scale. You can see here in this Edward Curtis image of the native Americans walking across the canyon floor and they are literally dwarfed by these giant sandstone maces. And here on the left, you've got Timothy O'Sullivan's photograph of these ruins, which I think have been photographed a number of times. But something that I find is interesting, when I look at this image, and we compare it to some later on in the book, that the photographs that come back from this period of the native Americans and how they have adapted to the landscape is that they have suited their lives to suit where they live. So they have made their houses in the cracks of these this this cliff face. And they are they are one with the land. Then the next page, you have the railroad, because the railroad is coming, we know it's coming. And then the telephone probably the telegraph pole, two things that revolutionized the opening up of the West to European Americans. And that must have changed the landscape so dramatically overnight. They're having these two abilities to to move quickly across the landscape but also then to to communicate back to people rather than you know, having to rely on Pony Express and all that sort of sort of good stuff. So you can see how there's a theme running through these books. And that's what I love about these kind of books rather than say like a monograph of a famous photographer, where it's all their images that sort of work together but don't necessarily have a narrative that goes through the entire book. With the coming of the railroad, of course, then there are comings of the car later on. And with the car, there are all the accoutrements that come with that. So we've got Edward Western's hot coffee there, which is juxtaposed against the scrubland. And already we can see the world that with a man is changing what's leaving his mark on it in a way that is not necessarily in harmony with his surroundings. I think it would be safe to say that you can't really talk about the American West without talking about cars. And this is Robert Frank's little contribution here. We have his very famous car covered Long Beach, which is that sort of that car that's been draped in looks like parachute material. And then the ubiquitous gas station. Now the gas stations show up within the American West, certainly latterly with great regularity. And that's hardly unsurprising given that the the Americans love their cars and this to everybody these days. But America seemed to take to them with with an absolute vengeance, which is hardly again anything, anything new. But I love photographs of gas stations of automobile infrastructure. There's something about it that draws me in. And that's a bit of a an uncomfortable feeling as we're going to see. This collection of three images, you've got a Dennis Hopper image, you've got Stephen Shaw and you've got an Adam Bartos. And here we are now beginning to see the problem with the car that the wonderful open empty natural landscapes that we saw at the beginning of the book are being destroyed by these swathes, these seas of concrete that come all over that that pristine landscape and have eradicated anything that lived there, you know, and shoveled it to one side in the name of progress. And that's maybe just in the way from talking about the photography itself. But I think it's important when you look at photographs, that you kind of think about the social context that they're in, because obviously, throughout the history of the American West, cultural norms have changed the way that people think about the West and its people and the people who were there originally, all of these things have changed. And photography, I believe has been the great motivator in doing that. Because not only can we see through the medium of photography, where people have come from, you can see what the land looked like before the Western man put his mark on it, like in the photographs of Robert Adams, for example, that tract housing going on. So it's a unique, certainly as far as I'm concerned, perspective of being able to see the transition of a world from its natural state into what we find today, which you don't tend to see in European history because that history has been so long. And so much of it was conducted prior to photography, boxy here. But here's a photograph of some mining that's going on in the turn of century 1904. And contrast that with images that we saw earlier, where is that empty landscape? Now, European Americans have discovered that there are resources, there are natural resources to be mined and to be stripped from the land. And this is the beginning of what I think is kind of like the end of the old mythology of the West, because, you know, things are starting to be industrialized, it's starting to have this feeling of being not a landscape that looks or inspiring, but a landscape that suggests the potential for overnight riches. And of course, you get the, you get the oil wells to get the derricks or the burning, what it says here, burning sludge by the Robert Adams image. And I can't think of a, of a better word, this sludge that man has stopped really caring about the world. And there's an interesting photograph here by Frank Gothic, Gothic Gothic of the, the, the trees that were blown down when Mount St Helens exploded in the early 80s. Now you look at that and obviously we know that that was done by natural cause, but you could almost imagine, almost imagine that this scene of desolation of these trees that have been felt in one go, could be manmade, that it could be something that man just comes along and sees a forest that has taken hundreds of years to grow up and just, and just destroys it overnight. It's a real shame. And of course, this is, there are many things with the modern world. But when you do look at photographs in this, this lens of using as social discussion, and you look at these images where people go, what is just a picture of a rubbish tip next to a highway? Why, why is that an inverted commas, an important photograph? It's because now, now you can see that man is just, it's really scummy, really. Isn't he just, you know, we just take so much for granted and just don't care about the environment. We don't look at it in a way that say, you know, the people who were there previously, the native Americans and people have been there for thousands of years, they were there for thousands of years and worked in harmony with the landscape, but they didn't destroy it. And here we are within the space of, you know, 100 years or so. This is 1997. So 1897, you know, that would have been possibly virgin land, who knows, right? But it draws into sharply, absolutely sharply, how much of an effect that we have on our landscape that originally, you know, people were told, you can't change this sort of thing. This is, this is a landscape in which man is secondary because he's so overwhelmed by the size and the sheer scale of everything in that world. The second part of the book is all about the people of the West. And I find that this book probably would have been more solid, more, more focused. Had it just been about the land, because I do find when it starts looking at the people, I don't feel a connection to most of these people. I find it they're interesting photographs. But I don't really see the themes coming through that you do see with say the landscape images. And, and there are there's no getting away from this. There are a lack of certain people in these in the photographs of the people of the West. The Native American photographs are almost conspicuous by the absence beyond the photographs that I think we would expect to see those kind of, you know, the Indian or the Native American study, as it were, you know, photograph back in the 1800s when that sort of thing was culturally acceptable. So while there are an interesting collection of portraits, and there are, you know, there's some interesting ideas there that everybody seems to look extremely confident, and, and actually at ease with the sort of things that they're doing, I don't feel that that connection to these images in the way that I do with the landscape. And that's of course, that's an interesting example of how you don't need to like everything. Some images and some exhibitions, because this was an exhibition, will have parts where you are very captivated with stuff and other stuff is just kind of like, man, I'm not really feeling this. There's nothing specifically wrong with the photographs, but they don't connect with me, don't resonate with me, possibly because I don't have a point of reference for them. As I mentioned, I have not been to the American West. My experience of America is limited to the East Coast and of the East Coast, only Florida and really sort of the DC area. So it's an extremely limited set of points to reference things. But anyway, it is it is a wonderful book. I do like it, except simply because it has given me an insight into the photographs of the early period of the West and how that has all changed. And it's introduced me to some wonderful photographers whom I was not aware of whose landscape photography is totally up my street that those things of desolation where despite man's ability to destroy the landscape, we are reminded that nature will always win. So, you know, we've given her a bloody nose, but she's going to come back fighting and we'll see what happens from all of that. On my bucket list of things to do at some point in my life is drive across America in a car and do the ubiquitous American road trip. I did a video recently about the photographs that sum up those ideas of the road trip. It's really interesting. I suggest you check it out. I'm going to link to it up here. And as always, it will be linked to in the description box below as well. Thank you ever so much for watching and I'll see you again soon.