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Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts Spring/Summer 2001, Volume 28, No.1 Re-Imaging the West: A New History Editor: Alicia Miller Table of Contents • In This Issue • $8 each (no discount) [Add to Cart]   table of contents 4. In This Issue by Alicia Miller 10. Visual Visitations: Connecting Past and Present Photographic Realities Theresa Harlan 22. Photographic Memory Marisa S. Olson 34. Screen Gab: The Net Bazaar Intimacy and the Internet JS Miller 36. Exhibition Review Beyond Boundaries: Contemporary Photography in California Friends of Photography / Ansel Adams Center Terri Cohn 38. Book Review Robert Parke Harrison / The Architect's Brother Erin Garcia 40. Books Received and Noted Rodrigo Diaz 43. In the Gallery Recent Exhibitions at SF Camerawork in this issue Re-Imaging the West: A New History by Alicia Miller What do we think of when we think of "the West"? That’s easy. First, and almost immediately, cowboys and Indians and lots of shooting - Hollywood has so saturated our psyche with these images, it’s a knee-jerk response. Then perhaps a landscape - an image of vast unpopulated space dotted by dusty little towns in the middle of nowhere, with tough (white) people who are at once industrious, ingenious, and big-hearted, full of all the right "good American values." Characters come to mind: the Sheriff, the Outlaw, the Hardworking Homesteader, even the Barmaid with a Heart of Gold. The Indian rarely appears as a full-fledged character, but rather as a vague malevolent force to be reckoned with. But the main character is, of course, the Frontier - the wild, unsettled edge of "our" land, which once held the constant promise of a better life and the righteous destiny of the country as a whole. This West is the place of the American dream, where the ideals of American nationhood were first tested and then imbedded in the popular imagination of the country. It is a symbol so broad and powerful that even from the perspective of a new millennium it still holds tremendous sway in the hegemonic identity of American culture. Americans are still wracked by a desperate "imperialist nostalgia," as anthropologist Renato Rosaldo has put it - an enduring romantic longing for that which it has destroyed. The West is alive and well all around us. Fashion designer Ralph Lauren has built an empire appropriating "a magnificent pastiche . . . of materials culled from British imperialism, native American aesthetics and working westerners’ rugged wear."1 The cowboy furniture of Thomas Molesworth is making a comeback, appearing in the storefront windows of Abercrombie & Fitch and San Francisco’s Gump’s.2 Movie stars are all buying ranches in Colorado, Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. Should you have any final doubts about the vitality of the West’s mythology, take a visit to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and stroll through the glut of galleries featuring wistful images of lone Indians gazing at the setting sun in paintings by white artists. The West features significantly in the landscape of our popular consumer culture. It is important to remember that the story of the American West has been told as much by fabulists and fabricators as by historians, and in many ways its history has been difficult to separate from its legends. Ann Fabian has written that the "commercial side of Western tale-telling - tale-selling - has been an abiding characteristic of representations of the West."3 Imagination has played a significant role in shaping the rhetoric of the West. It is appropriate then that the artists of Re-Imaging the West: A New History - Ken Gonzales-Day, Eirik Johnson, Simon Norfolk, Matt O’Brien, Deborah O’Grady, Pipo, David Taylor, Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, Joo Kyung Yoon - should use a creative approach in shaping a new narrative for the western frontier in their work. They take as their departure point the tropes of the American West and ask us to consider them anew, to contemporize and contextualize them in light of the more complex history of the West that historians and cultural critics have brought to the fore in the past twenty years. Their images of the West present a different picture for our consideration, one markedly different from that immortalized in earlier forms of cultural production - the paintings or photographs of Frederic Remington and Edward Curtis, the novels of Zane Grey, or the glut of B-grade Westerns produced by Hollywood that the baby boomer generation grew up on; and certainly one different from the ubiquitous Marlboro Man, who, as if exemplifying the deconstruction of our cultural idols, is now parodied in anti-smoking ads. The images presented by the artists of Re-Imaging the West bring another perspective on the West’s history to the fore, one that problematizes the West of Renaldo’s "imperialist nostalgia." English artist Simon Norfolk takes a hard and unsentimental look at this nostalgia in his series Long Time, No See: Travels in Injun Country. Visiting Indian reservations, tourist sites, and curio shops across America, he takes us on an unforgiving tour of the disturbing appropriation, romanticization, and subsequent commercialization of all things Native American. He shows us postcards of chimpanzees with feather headdresses, a group of dolls representing a range of Indian tribes ("Collect them all!" commands the box), a teepee painted on the wall surrounding the entrance to a convenience store, and endless white people dressed in some popular notion of Native garb. The images recount the ironic evisceration of the history of Anglo-Native relations - all the violence and oppression painted over in pleasant simulacra. His images remind me of the time I spent in fourth grade studying California’s Pomo Indians, who were genocidally decimated by Anglo-European settlement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We re-created a Pomo settlement in a nearby state park, made the acorn mash that was a traditional staple of their diet, and learned basket weaving as a key to understanding their culture. An easy sympathy for, and therapeutic engagement of, this "other" culture was encouraged - their history was our history; we need not feel such alienation. Such institutionalized exercises serve to alleviate the weight of responsibility for the erasure of another people. The cost of the Anglo-European conquest of America’s western frontier was profound, and there is a less majestic tale that is told in the effects of this colonization. The doctrine of Manifest Destiny that drove it also gave a moral basis for the United States’ expansionism, and for many decades western narratives both popular and historical never questioned or even entertained alternative perspectives on the rightness of this conquest. But the tide has turned, and historians, cultural critics, writers, and artists are unraveling the West’s mythology of white hope and capitalist entitlement. Re-Imaging the West offers us a picture of what a revised history of the West might look like. Ken Gonzales-Day and Pipo offer us specific visual revisions by re-creating in their work a history of the West that is absent or missing from our popular conceptions. Pipo, a Vietnamese refugee, began his series AnOther Western when living in the Pacific Northwest. His work as a whole has focused on his own assimilation ("assimulation" as he puts it) into American culture, and AnOther Western grew out of these concerns . Similarly Gonzales-Day also appropriates a nineteenth-century form, in his case the frontier novel. It is in such novels that many of the myths and tropes of the West were first laid out. Bone Grass Boy: The Secret Banks of the Conejos River, a series of narrative tableaux and text, purports to be a rediscovered novel based on the life of Ramoncita, a Native/Latina berdache. A berdache is a transgendered person, considered an important member of Native and Latino communities in the Southwest but long erased from Anglo-European tales of the West. Gonzales-Day returns this missing figure to the West of the popular imagination by inserting her into an important form of cultural production. Gonzales-Day re-creates the novel he had always been searching for in hopes that, as is so often with the West, this "legend actually becomes fact."4 The work of Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie revises the West from a more activist position. Working from appropriated photographs made by whites of Native Americans and their indigenous homelands, she adds ironic text to the images to bring her Native voice back into the picture. Acknowledging how captions can be used to inflect the photographic image, her textual additions turn these photographs on end, allowing the pictured subject to speak from within the image rather than be spoken for in an added caption. Her commentary, often wry and humorous, asks the viewer to reconsider what they see. At issue is Native sovereignty, which has been constantly embattled by the political, social, economic, and ideological constructs of the United States. The semantics of the West inevitably coalesce around the land itself. The first step in the American conquest of the West was made in the exploration of the land during the western survey expeditions. Lewis and Clark first made real the possibility of connecting the two shores of the North American continent. In the nineteenth century, exploration and assessment of what the land held was conducted on an institutional level as the U.S. government became actively engaged in the organization of survey expeditions. Our first visual understanding of the West was conveyed in images by governmental survey photographers such as Timothy O’Sullivan, William Henry Jackson, A.J. Russell, and others. Their work hailed the beginning of a long history of western landscape photography that runs through Carleton Watkins, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and even to Robert Adams. All, with the exception of Robert Adams, focused on the power and beauty of the West’s spaces. The landscape work in Re-Imaging the West, however, has a very different focus. The land, for photographers Eirik Johnson, David Taylor, and Deborah O’Grady, is the cover for a hidden destructive history of American colonization. Johnson contemporizes the stereograph form, playing banal images of contemporary Seattle off of historical captions detailing the significance of these sites to the indigenous population. David Taylor takes on the complex issue of water in the West, a subject emblematic of the underside of Manifest Destiny. His examination of the Grand Coulee Dam project considers the way "progress" privileges one culture’s needs over another’s and looks at the cost of the dam to the Colville Indians who inhabited the flood plain. Deborah O’Grady uses sound in her series Talking Lake to bring submersed histories to the surface in her images. Working in Lake County, in northern California, O’Grady combines elegant landscape images with a sound collage of voices. She seeks to reveal the nature of the place pictured in her images, not just as it seen today, but complete with the memories of those who have inhabited the land. The landscape work of Re-Imaging the West does not provide a space for the contemplation of the sublime, where one anticipates the blessing of God to fall upon all who enter this realm of wonder and enchantment. These landscapes are anything but majestic. They are a means of unearthing memories erased in written history but still living in the land. Past and present come together again in the work of Matt O’Brien. Back to the Ranch (1991-99) examines the long history of ranching in Contra Costa County, California. For nearly three centuries, the hills east of San Francisco Bay have provided ideal grazing land for cattle since their introduction at the start of Spanish settlement. Back to the Ranch began as a simple document of the present-day lives of one of the West’s most enduring figures, the cowboy. O’Brien looked at the presence of ranching and its unique culture in his own backyard so to speak (he lives in the East Bay city of Berkeley). But as his work progressed some five years, his own proximity to the ranching industry began to reveal itself as an insidious threat. San Francisco Bay Area suburbia was expanding ever outward into the vast rolling hills that separate it from the Central Valley and were so ideal for cattle grazing. Ranching is disappearing as the land becomes more valuable for building housing subdivisions than for raising cattle. Placed against the background of suburban encroachment, the cowboy foretells the death of the West. Viewing O’Brien’s images creates a sense of disjuncture. Where are the vast, open spaces, the endless expanse of rangeland that has always accompanied the cowboy? We realize with a jolt that "the West" is now an image of memory; it has no place in our present century. Now the cowboy when he rides often hears the roar of passing commuters on the freeway. And when the West dies in the popular imagination, what then? Joo Kyung Yoon provides the most provocative look at a "new" history of the West - when its current myths and tropes are destroyed. She stands at the edge of Monument Valley, perhaps the most iconic of western landscapes, holding a red flag. The very presence of another flag - definitely not the stars and stripes - suggests a change of allegiance. Though to what this allegiance is remains ambiguous: the color red certainly has a broad range of social, cultural, and political associations. At first the flag obscures her identity, but in the final frame of this triptych it reveals her as an Asian woman, reminding us that the West finally dissipates into the Pacific Rim. What is she doing with her flag? Will she claim this landscape as her own, plant her flag down into the ground among the desert scrub? The simple possibility that she might is anarchic when juxtaposed against what the West has stood for in American culture. But her presence in the landscape definitively implies that the West is up for grabs. Alicia Miller, editor Alicia Miller is associate director of SF Camerawork and curator of Re-Imaging the West: A New History. 1 Ann Fabian, "History for the Masses/Commercializing the Western Past," in Under an Open Sky/Rethinking America’s Western Past, ed. William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993): 235. 2 For a full write-up, see Elizabeth Claire Flood, "Best of the West," in Sunset, February 2001, 12. 3 Fabian, "History for the Masses," 228. 4 Ibid., 227. home | about | exhibitions | bookstore | events | membership | journal | mentoring | links Copyright 2002. SF Camerawork. All Rights Reserved.