Here, surrounded by wonderful collections, supportive colleagues, supported by an institution that supported its staff, that i first began to care about western photographs. I came here as a very young curator, moderately ignorant as how museums worked and utterly ignorant of the history of photography. I left 10 years later a little bit wiser and certain that i found a field that was interesting and would engage me for the rest of my career. For those in the audience that supported me, thank you. To the rest of you, i hope you know how fortunate you are to have this wonderful institution and these collections, right here. Afternoontalk this about photography and the American West, a new medium in a new place that came of age together. In 1839, the year that a french man announced his New Invention to the world, much of the land now called the American West lay outside the political boundaries of the United States. In a british claimed oregon immigrants were at work ringing with indians. Diplomats were seeking recognition. California a swiss immigrant bot land to construct a trading post. It cannot take long for photographers to reach these parts of the continent. News of the astonishing invention by which nature herself through the action of light seemed to inscribe her image on a small metal plate. This capture the american imagination. By the 1840s, the daguerreotype ists were at work in the American West. May we have the first slides . On the screen. Ok. Over the coming decades, photographers would it take to the field with cameras and tripods, chemicals making vivid pictures of this place whose astonishing resources beckoned americans westward and to ensure their enterprise. Photographers follow troops, as you see here, into a war in mexico that would result in the annexation of california and the american southwest. They were worded shifting recorded shifting fortunes of gold seekers and they set out across the trails to record what immigrants would see. They pictured the wests native people largely to show that they fade in therade expanding United States. And they documented the deepest canyons and highest peaks, the divine blessings bestowed upon the american nation. And photographs such as being, whatcans found evidence of they had and who they were, what they could become. And in the west, photography found its most distinctive subject. And yet, and here i want to be a bit contrarian, for all of the fresh detail and realism of these images, photography did not instantly change the way americans understood the west. I want to argue this afternoon that americanspreexisting visions of the west fed by novels and drawings made them resistant to the relatively cramped and static content of the photographic image. Throughout the second half of the 19th century, there lingered a tension, a tension between the fabled west of the imagination and the more constrictive vision of the place that work captured were captured on a the daguerreotype plates. This story, their failure to alter perceptions of the west, was not the story i imagined telling when i first came to the Amon Carter Museum to be a curator. The historian i embraced precious glimpses of a lost world and the valuable material artifacts which were commanding high prices in the burgeoning photographic market. But then i got stumped. At first, by next set of photographs and then by the story of an extraordinary photographer. In these cases, iran up against peculiar problem the early photographs i still valued, those i wanted to see and hold seemed not to have inspired any interest whatsoever in the 19th century. , i wonder, the pictures and that seemed so engaging to me could have been so little value to in their own time. I will begin by telling you two stories, the story of the photographs and that extraordinary photographer, the story that helped me think in a these photographs and the west and the american imagination. I will talk about the daguerreotypes of the mexicanamerican war and of california. And of its conclusion. When i came in 1979, there were precisely 12 mexican war related daguerreotypes. Universityen at yale. And are tremendously exciting images, the best known of them was this one, an image that depicted general john wool in his troops marching down the street in 1847. This body of pictures represented the earliest examples of photojournalism in the world. The very first time a photographer had gone out with a camera to photograph an event for its newsworthy value. They are of course the world first photographs of war. You can imagine the excitement with which i received a phone call here at Amon Carter Museum in 1980, from a colleague in connecticut. He asked if i heard the exciting news. He said that west point had acquired a collection of daguerreotypes. That was terrific am i picked up the phone to call might counter cap my colleague at west point. He said, good timing. This morning a board of trustees turned it down, they are not here. I said, well, where are they . He said i cannot tell you. So i called back the book dealer who had told me about their existence in the first place and i asked where they were. He said he did not know. I told him, you are my friend and you are smart, coming back. And he did. He gave me the name of a man in virginia and i called this gentleman to arrange to see these 50 daguerreotypes. I asked if he would send them to me to look at. He said no. I asked if i could come to look at them. He said no. I if i could meet him in the city. He said he did not drive in cities. So i asked if we could meet at dulles airport. He agreed and we met and he gave me a bag and inside of it were paper towels, each child with a daguerreotype inside. Although he wanted me to open the bag on the floor of the airport, i declined and took them into the city and open them in the smithsonian. Keep in this image in your mind, the very first one i opened was this one. If you can orient yourself, you are looking at a very abused image ins solarized reverse. Dog here, you can see the is on the previous image. This is very exciting, and matched it matched the photographer that i had seen earlier. It meant that the general had stopped, not just once, but twice. To pose for this photographer who had set up his tripod and camera in those streets. The collection included another more wonderful images. Including this one, now thought to be the best photograph of the common soldier in the mexican war. This one, the closest image we have two warfare itself chosen artillery case lined up near a battlefield near buena vista. This image was one of two civilian portraits that were included in the collection. The back of this image has a mysterious label, it says mexican lady, 10. I have not figured out what that meant. [laughter] the collection also included wonderful military portraits, including this one of a general ,f virginia who was very ramrod street, not flexible as this fortress adjusts. I spent a very long time working on these daguerreotypes. I never find out who made them. I read every newspaper from a major city that covered the war. And i can say that no one saw these daguerreotypes in the 19th century, they are not exhibited, they did not prove to the be the basis for prints that were redraw on or in illustrated books about the mexican war. Nobody saw them. No one saw them, i couldnt figure out who made them like any historian sometimes i have to grapple with how to turn lemons into lemonade. About thenking photographs change how i thought about this one. This is an image identified on the back as the grave of henry clay jr. This was a wonderful clue, i knew a day he had been killed, in february 1847. I knew that he was the son of the famous kentucky aikman statesman and his that had stirred the passion of americans, lots of poetry celebrating his here was an appeared in newspapers. He was buried here and when troops went back to kentucky, they took his body home. There was this image of his grave, but the way that most americans understood the death of young mr. Clay was through this popular print, by the american printmakers. Now, what kind of image do you prefer to see . The image of the lonely grave, or the image that inscribed his death with the kind of heroes them here was in. War and not a popular for those that wanted to understand what young men were wouldon the battlefield want to imagine it like this, his white trousers, his comrade holding him, his dying words ie said to have been, cannot not live, to limit to fight on. Now, the mexican war daguerreotypes have been discovered a new. They have been reinvested with meaning, not just for their ability to convey detailed information about military dress or the appearance of officers, but for the immediacy of their status as eyewitnesses use and they are connections to those events. The connection that surpasses that of any historical artifact. Of thaterreotypes general parading the streets were actually there. They were made without negatives, the plates had to have been in physical closeness to the subject. Passing on of the plates and like a mirror on a memory, the plates continue to record the physical traces of that longago event. To hold the plates in one hand is to hold physical actual evidence that wool was in and that these events happen and absence of literary documentation, particular gathering of onlookers and soldiers once took place as the dog looked on from the side. Of thetidian nature sodence, the sort that is useful to military and social historians is exactly however what made them unuseful to contemporary 19thcentury softrs who saw affirmation, not information. The immediacy of the war to littleeotypes have emotional weight against other narratives and iconic visual rendering, particularly those such as the one i showed you that could convey more vivid narratives of battlefield dramas and death. Photography, it might have supplied in iowa and glimpse of event that led to the final definition of the western United States, but the medium did not yet have the power or capacity to serve as an important way of conveying information about that place. Or to prompt americans to consider different ways of imagining their expanding world. S to for the daguerreotype follow the american troops through mexico, competition came from print and from panoramas, large narrative paintings on canvas that would scroll from a roller to another roller on a stage. Accompanied by spoken narratives that amplified the moving pictures, these were inwardly popular entertainments, precursors two movies. The mexican war was a popular topic for panoramas, but the west was the most popular subject of all. Early photographers could not alp but envy the success of man whose enormous panoramas moved up the Mississippi River and then traveled to london. His paintings scrolls three miles across canvas and that meant that a 2 00 p. M. Matinee trip down the Mississippi River would be followed by a 7 p. M. Trip of the Mississippi River, because it took so long to unscrew unscroll. The panorama painters displaying the life of this mr. Jones, one ists. E famous daguerreotyp own version of his life is that of a frontiersman, a country lawyer and crusader for womens rights. Ofwas a kind of forest gump the 19th century who claimed to be the first white man to see the Yosemite Valley and counted among his friends mark twain and abraham lincoln. Toually, his bombast is easy dismiss, but there is some truth in his claims. He did once study law who had been a law partner of abraham lincoln, but there is no reason to doubt his most amazing claim. Which is, in 1851 he led a party is and at sketch artist from california all the way back to st. Louiss, making the daguerreotypes that would serve as studies for an enormous panorama that he called the panther scope of california. Penta scope of california. His claim of these daguerreotype s seemed implausible, but he did provide documents of the interior west, capturing images of topographic features and important site along the oberlin trail. The first pictures of western indian communities and even the first daguerreotype of the buffalo. History of ranks among one of the most ambitious photographic projects. But the panther scope, the movie painting, was void imagined as in the end product of his labors. Like countless other expeditions that expedition is, they valued other studies of representation, once the daguerreotypes served their purpose, they disappear. 1850 hopingest in like sofortune, but many others, he quickly found that the way to make money was by servicing the minors. He tried to work in stores, they conceived a scheme designed to retrieve an unlucky throw of the dice. He hired a crew of sketch artist and they began their project in california, photographing the s and then set out east on the trails. By october, they were in st. Louis, where they showed daguerreotypes to reporters for the local newspaper and reporters announced that the extraordinary daguerreotypes were works of interest for the beauty of their scenes and of instructions for their faithfulness. Back in 1852, jones was melrose, massachusetts with a team of artists working to transform small images on his very small plates to his enormous moving painting. Pantoscopestmas, his of california opened in boston. He had two shows a day and after boston, he toured the new england states. Newllowed 1853, he was in york city. Everywhere he was attracting enthusiastic audiences of the elite. Jones however being jones, with a little trouble on the side, was dogged by legal problems, he conceived of a lottery scheme, you could win a house, a piano, pantass watch, or the cope itself, but you never give away prizes. He was investigated and the scheme fell apart. He moved on to a series of other careers and the painting disappears from historical record, just as the daguerreotypes had disappeared. I spent a long time looking for these and i came tantalizingly close, actually found his great great great granddaughter who still lives near the town in massachusetts where he made the painting and i contacted her and she said that she had a family trunk full of things and said, would you like me to open it with you . Be still my heart. She brought it and we opened it to gather, together. It did not have any daguerreotypes to it did have sketchbooks and those are now part of historical society. So we do not have his painting, we do not have his daguerreotype s, but we do have his lecture notes. The music, the scale of the painting, the music of his voice must still be imagined, but his notes document his painting and his end of the story. Jones needed words, from your from the images alone, it could not give a voice. He talked about the miserable remnant, the savages, the worst of slaves. The native californian and mexican were but little removed from savages from whom they were in part to send it. He encouraged listeners and theers to come to, magnificent city of San Francisco now saved from here in isaiah and terrorizing mexican officials. It was a new american empire, he wrote. Needed to makeas life comfortable and happy. Why dwell on his expedition and when nothing but words remained to document either the photographs or the panorama . His adventure is important i think, for what it reveals about the cultural value of daguerreotypes during the early era of photography in the American West. Jones risked physical and financial hazard to secure his daguerreotypes, to photograph for the first time the landmarks that would become iconic emblems of the westward expansion. However, the daguerreotypes held a value not as artifacts, but as forms of information. And the copies, rendered more easy to see through the medium of the painted panorama, they were worth more than the originals. Public wanted images to reconfirm what they already unnecessaryt the conquest of the west. They wanted pictures that would validate old ideas, not inspire new ones. Were tooaguerreotypes small, too small to tell the story of westward expansion. In a world filled with other visual representation, these daguerreotypes did not win instant acclaim. They work for him and so many others, simply the means to a more dramatic and enthralling end. Ok, how then do 19thcentury photographs come to claim a place in the american imagination . How do they become an important source for americans eager to learn about the west . I think technological change, as much as anything else, was as possible for winning for photography a place in the cultural marketplace. In the late 1850s, the west plate negative process was replacing the daguerreotype. The daguerreotypes as adjusted earlier were single images, not easily reproduced. But with new technology, photographers gained the capacity to make an unlimited number of prints on paper. From a single glass plate negatives. The economics of the business changed. So too did the weight of photographers could convey stories with pictures. Now they had language. Became possible to make photographs on paper, then the vast majority of western photographs entered the marketplace with descriptive words, words scrawled across, printed on the face of the prince, pasted on the back. With words, photography could finally become a narrative medium. A narrative medium that could compete with the compelling stories told by print, panoramas, by other kinds of paintings. The words on these pictures directed the viewers understanding of images, imposing meaning, privileging and interpretation over others were many seemed possible. These words inevitably enhance the narrative potential and function of photographic images, helping to transform static orges of scenes into stories predicted announcements, records of disappointment, visions of triumph. Words, words as much as the images themselves proclaimed that the western landscape was a place of wonder and bouncy and endless possibility. Words proclaimed that this picture of the newly built railroad bridge was of interest, not because it represented an engineering feat, but because it creek full of marvelous trial. And words explained to viewers about a windmill, of interest not because of its form, but as evidence that the windswept plains had ample Water Supplies to meet the needs of wouldbe settlers. , words again i clarified that this picture of a lake in the White Mountains of tha arizonavided, and itst entirety is another worthless desert that many suppose it to be. Similarly, it was words that explained that this photograph of the falls depicted a site suitable for hunting and gravy and tourism. Grazing and tourism. There was miraculous gold digging, is the tackler eagles nest above the falls. Only with words could he know that the bald eagles inhabited that rock and only with words could this place be inscribed national significance, with economic promise, with a prosperous american future. Western landscape photographs became bound up in a progressive narrative, one that echoed and expanded the rhetoric of manifest destiny. In the American West, these pictures proclaimed, made the future of the american nation. This triumphant visual narrative played a counterpart to another somber story. Of the westphs native people caught up in a narrative of decline, not of triumph. The narrative symbolized by the vanishing race, because of the native people disappearing, the land was americas to take. And so, consider how captions, words again, describe the photograph of the indian people that came before the public eye. Indian peopleibed with strangeness, assigned them evil deeds. The words in a catalogue issued by the federal government in 1877 explained that little crow, who you see here, quote, martha the letter group of ans against the whites. Back ofrawled on the this image explained that these men were in jail for scalping a white man. The words appended to this titled the vanishing race the indians stripped of their primitive dress are passing into the darkness of an unknown future. With words, photography was a narrative medium, the insistent realism mitigated by the words that while images into complicated stories about manifest destiny, american expansion, and the faulty logic of a vanishing race. When we insist today on transforming such images and art, collectible objects, and pictures that speak to any ideas or arguments, we do not look at them as 19th century audiences and counted them. For viewers at the time, the words of fixed to these pictures were essential to understanding the cultural and political meanings. Images visualize the past, and historical photographs visualize it best of all, allowing us a glimpse of lost worlds that radiate an unquestionable veracity. Photographs seem to tell us about things that we would not otherwise know, the emotion visible in an ancestors face, like deadwoodown looked like to its first inhabitants. Such pictures resonate with authority because of their age, and part of because despite all we know about digital manipulation, we still presume their accuracy. Carefully displayed on a museum , old documentary film photographs represent other historical moments, and neither Museum Curators or film producers do much to discourage the illusion that photographs can confer a deep understanding of the past. They seem to persuade us that what matters most is visual or visualized. How useful are photographs as historical evidence . Despite their increasing ubiquity and american life, photographs can never provide more than select evidence. Its selective, not just in the sense of favorite something on a particular day, but favoring what is in the range of human site at all. Powerful economic forces, political ideologies, whether cycles, these things are not easily photographs. Our vast archive of historical photographs favors the anecdotal, the every day, and ofming ordinaryness photographs seems to imply its value as a record of daily life, but photographs cannot explicate complex in events. They detect outcomes, more readily than causes. They depict outcomes of more readily than causes. Photographs more easily to take the material trappings of wealth than the Global Forces that brought it about. Easily document the appearance of a particular piece of land. In this case, men are clearing the parallel boundary that would separate United States from canada. They document the appearance of a piece of land to explain the political or diplomatic machinations that brought it under control of a particular nation. This inherent particularity of photography creates an illusion that photographs are so concrete that they are selfexplanatory. But they almost never are. Photographs can describe the past, but they have a limited capacity to explain it, no matter how much we might wish they could. The photographic record of the past is uneven, given to emphasizing certain plaisance, things, events at the expense of others, selected moments that flash up from the continuum of time. Unlike writers or painters, photographers, in the era before computers, had to be in close proximity to their subject, such an observation seems obvious, but consequences are farreaching. Unthinkingly visualize the civil war to the appearance of Union Activities and northern sites, rather than southern ones, giving little thought to the naval blockade of southern ports that made it difficult for seven photographers to make a visual record. Similar sorts of visual inequities exist in the documentation of western American History. The gold rush california, attracting photographers who created a visual record in the 1850s that was far more extensive than contemporary records existing for arizona or new mexico, nebraska, or kansas. Despite photographys affordability, 19thcentury studio photographs favor certain social classes over others, leaving us with relatively few pictures of the urban core or migrant workers. Patrons meant that new towns were photographed more than those that had fallen into ruin and disrepair. In need of investors money were photographed more extensively than urban sweatshops. Landscapes like yosemite attracted developers and tourists, pictured more often than the foreboding desert of the arid west. Similarly, the taste of consumers depicted that indians would be photographed more often than hispanic people. The cowboys would be pictured more often than urban clerks. In a marketdriven world of 19thcentury photography, images that picture the romance of progress prevailed, prevailed over those that visualized the cost and dangers of empire. , any story about the American West during the second half of the 19th century constructed solely from photographic sources would be ,ncomplete, idiosyncratic lacking in any narrative shape say that provided by the storyteller. Might be able to reconstruct a vision that a particular captain of industry had for his wouldilroad line, but we be hardpressed to reconstruct the experiences of his road crew. I have a standing reward to any of my students who can find one of the chinese laborers in this celebrated photograph of the golden spike ceremony in 1869 joined the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads and created a Transcontinental Railroad line for the United States. The workers were there that day, but they had been pushed to the side outside the photographer who recorded the event for posterity. Might limps with the Spanish Missions of california looked like for those who raised the funds to restore them, but we could not show how they appeared to their hispanic or indian parishioners who worshiped on the inside. Planesould show what indian life look like from the perspective of military force, we could not convey what it looked like from inside a but the scope of our work with none the less remain narrow and incomplete, and we would need to guard against the konstantin tatian to let particular photographs stand for general events or conversely to let unidentified images stand for the expenses of particular individuals. Documentary film makers do that all the time. It is hard to reconcile them with the contingencies that inhabit any particular moment in historical time. Exclude fromlt to our readings of photographs our knowledge of what comes next. So, if photographs have shifting meanings, unstable messages shaped by the context of which they were made and marketed, should we describe them as Historical Documents . Not at all, i would argue. The very qualities that make old photographs problematic as Historical Documents, selected miss, capacity to contain shifting meanings, illusions of veracity, emphasis on the vernacular, these are the conditions that make them fascinating and compelling. If they cant always convey the complexities of the construction , they can exert an almost on thec pole on that pull. They create bonds between us and people we will never know, faces we will never see. For all the differences they mark between our world and earlier moment in our nations history and a monochromatic rendering of the world filled with Little Details that can shock us with their strangest as easy as with the familiarity, such photographs still underscore the Common Ground we. Hare with our ancestors in showing us what the physical landscape used to look like, to give us a way to measure change and impact of our actions. In making visible human passions and emotions that we ourselves seem to recognize to help instill within us that wonderful thing we call the historical imagination. In the interpretation of historical photographs, there is no separating the viewer from the object of his gaze. Pastevery event of the that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns, threatens to disappear irretrievably i. It is our engagement that shapes and defines meanings. Stories, but they tell stories only to the extent that we ask them to, and as our questions change, the stories do as well. Notwithstanding such instability of meaning, photographs remain forrkably rich and useful those who study the national past. Ultimately, the greatest value lies not in the information they convey about the appearance of a place, the shape of an object, the cast of a phase, but in the ways that they elicit stories from us from their viewers. In one sense, photographs stop time. They remain paradoxically dynamic artifacts. If in the mid19th century they seemed at first unable to alter americans collective imagining of the west, they have, over time to inform and shake our master narrative of the nations western past and to fix it in our collective imagination. The pass is not simply there , it must be articulated to become memory. In photographs of the 19thcentury west are the visual articulations of a national past, potent bits of pictorial shorthand summoned up from our collective psyche, deep social memory of a particular place and moment in American History. , thesehcentury viewers viewers resonated differently than they do for us. To those actually caught up in the exploration of the west and the perspective economic the moment of the region and the ongoing debates over the fate of the western indians, these photographs held political, economic, and cultural implications that are difficult for us to recover. Yet even in the 19 century, these photographs plus plucked the mystic chords of memory and stir the imagination of americans encountered now by us through the veil of social memory, the evoke different and we they are read, would do well to listen to the stories, tales that mediate between past and present, and ways to know america is way and how to visualize it. In these shifting photographic stories are the whispers of ambitions and dreams, hopes and disappointments, love and hatreds of our own time and of the past. Thank you very much. [applause] martha i will be happy to take some questions. Introductionn the to the book that you are writing about photographs made for a public viewing rather than a private viewing. Would you say that those made for private viewing were more successful and how they were received by the public than thosethat were made for that did not see an audience . The vast majority of pictures made in the 19 century were what i would call private pictures, portraits. They were made for paying clients. Yes, when you went into a studio and gave it with to the photographer and got a photograph, you controlled and understood precisely what it was about and how you wanted to use it. Yes, those photographs were more successful in conveying intended meaning to intended audience, but it was a limited audience. Ananybody who has gone to antique store and seeing a anonymous old portraits can attest, once portraits no longer blanche to the family, they lose no meaning whatsoever longer belong to the family, they lose all meaning whatsoever. Martha questions . Yeah. I have a question regarding the advent of photography. Of the coming Industrial Age of the 19 century, how do of concile that sort now that we look at those photographs, we attach a lot of in aticism to that era historical fashion. Do you see that as parallel with andaps the transcendental luminous movement, or do you see typical . Typical and martha i think that our reading of many 19thcentury landscapes as romantic documents is a 21st century reading. Goin, if you are able to back and find the original context in which these landscapes appear you often find they were produced with very different messages intended. They were meant to tell different stories. Again, i have come across a 19thcentury landscape that looks like a terrific, beautiful scene, and to my 21st century eyes it makes me want to be a tourist. When i find the captions that that picture was published, the scene seemed to be of interest to 19thcentury viewers because there was a gold mine there. You cant see the goldmine, but it is there. Or a landscape of the great plains was of interest because it was so flat and empty that the Railroad Line could easily be constructed across it. Those are the kinds of associations that i dont think pick up whend or we look at these photographs now, especially when we encounter them without the words they were marketed in the 19th century. You are meant to do a very interesting part of one who is not a scholar, but a collector. Was that man aware of what the importance of what he had . How did you establish the ability to transfer from his ownership, and where are they now . Martha they are here at the Amon Carter Museum. I hadablished value, and to decide whether to meet it or not. Did he know what he had . Martha he knew that he had the daguerreotypes the document to the war, but he did not realize that he had a photograph of pol k. Any more questions . Great. Thank you all for coming. [applause] on history bookshelf, here from the countrys bestknown history writers of the past decade every saturday at 4 00 p. M. Eastern. Visit our website, cspan. Org history anytime. Youre watching American History tv, all we can, every weekend on cspan3. American history tv features the city of santa rosa, california, where Luther Burbanks lived for more than 50 years. He developed hundreds of strains and varieties of plants, including the rest of potato. Posted by our cable partners, staffs city tours recently visited. Learn more about santa rosa all we can cure on American History tv. Sonoma county agricultural history began with wine. The first vines planted here were by general vallejo. They were mission grapes, and nobody would make wine out of them now, that they did