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• 1 media/Screen Shot 2020-04-14 at 5.55.19 PM.png media/william-henry-jackson-central-city,-colorado.jpg 2020-04-23T00:53:16+00:00 William Henry Jackson 14 Denise Johnson essay plain 2020-05-27T21:04:54+00:00 Complicit with the nation’s settler colonizing tactics, through a shrewd rendering of space, American landscape painters conspired with early photographers to depict the western frontier as vacant, capacious, and untouched. Significantly, William Henry Jackson was actively engaged in such cultural production as both a painter and a photographer, and his fluid movement between the two discourses afforded the photographer a profoundly influential translation of 19th century American colonization efforts into the 20th century. As a young man, Jackson worked as a painter, illustrated his experiences as soldier in the Union Army, and began a photography practice at the end of the Civil War using the wet-plate collodion process (Knudsen). The wet-place process was lengthy and cumbersome–photographers like Jackson had to carry extensive equipment and chemistry to develop the exposures they made on glass or metal plates on-site. While working with the Hayden Expedition, Jackson would have utilized multiple cameras for making stereoscopic, whole plate (about 8 X 10”), and mammoth view images (about 18 X 20”), which demanded a team of assistants to pack, carry, and set-up the fragile instruments on terrain that was often inaccessible to pack animals.
  
  
  
  Perhaps it is not surprising then, that Jackson’s photographs recall works by Gustave Courbet, another famous painter/photographer who was also, not coincidentally, interested in the newly forming field of geology. For example, Jackson’s albumen print, Central City, Colorado, c. 1881 features a scenic hilltop view of a boom city evocative of Courbet’s paintings of Ornans from the 1850s. In the foreground stands a cliché colonizing figure: a miner with pick axe swung over his right shoulder in a smarmy manner, his left foot planted firmly on higher ground to convey his possession and ownership of the space. But the background is just as important in this photo, for in the magnitude of its scale and the implied suggestion of replication on the other side of the horizon, the viewer is led to believe that the wide open mountainous terrain as depicted are full of untold resources, ready for the taking, and inextinguishable.
  
  
• 1 2020-05-10T01:27:04+00:00 Absurdity 10 Denise Johnson Interviews Julie Shafer Pt. 2 plain 2020-05-16T01:26:22+00:00 Julie Shafer discusses the absurdity of the choices emigres had to make while traveling along the path.
  
  
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  Transcript:
  
  "I think it was like…yeah there was something definitely intriguing about this fork in the path, because the location of the parting of the ways is in some of the remote terrain that I’ve ever been in, and you can definitely tell that from the picture. And so, thinking that there’s an option, or that there’s somehow a better route than another when standing at that fork, I initially just found it kind of comical because option A and B seem pretty equal to me. Just cause there was nothing as far as the eye could see in either direction. And so, I started just thinking about that idea, at that part in the journey, these emigrants had been walking for, I don’t know, about a thousand miles, and that you come across this fork, and as far as you can tell both directions, you know, look equal. Of course, I’m flat out wrong, and my initial impression is really inaccurate, as I discovered. But, I think my initial attraction was just sort of like both of those options look equally challenging. So, the idea of a fork in the road in the middle of something already so extreme, and already so harsh, I found to be absurd, and kind of comical." - Julie Shafer May 5, 2020