Conclusion
Critical to Shafer’s process is a willful disruption of the precious surface of the photographic print. Having experienced nature presenting itself while on location, in the dark room Shafer boiled one of their chemical baths, resulting in an intensified grain on the final prints. In this way, Shafer renders the atmosphere of so-called “big sky country” physically present and just on the edge of perceptibility suggesting the manner that migrants likely experienced extremes in weather, wind, and other inhospitable elements along the trail as they moved westward guided by an ephemeral and transitory promise of something better ahead. As Hannah Arendt argues, “we first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves,” (148) Shafer’s work posits that the communal duration of such grueling and formidable conditions shaped emigre’s ideas of liberty. Having decided to act, undertaking a treacherous journey full of unknowns, those who journeyed westward visualized freedom with others in the vexing spaces of the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the Snake River Canyon, and the Blue Mountain range. While they may have encountered the sublime at points of meditation and grand vistas along the way, freedom was more likely understood long after the journey had ended. Nearly two hundred years later, amidst strikingly visible inequities in wealth, opportunity, and the space in which to act, Shafer’s Parting of the Ways series asks Americans if freedom must always be a condition of opposites? Is it possible that we might imagine liberty that is equitably distributed, and achieved without theft, slaughter, and deception? As such, in the stubbornly present, exaggerated clumps of silver on the surfaces of these images, Shafer gestures towards the possibilities of something otherwise, found alongside the atmosphere.