Martha
A. Sandweiss receives literary
award...
Martha A. Sandweiss
National Endowment for the Humanities/
Weatherhead
Resident Scholar 2000-2001
Picture Stories: Photography,
Popular Culture and the Nineteenth-Century West
In Picture Stories: Photography, Popular Culture
and the Nineteenth Century West, SAR resident scholar Martha
A. Sandweiss traces public reaction to the emerging medium of photography
as it documented the exploration of the American west. "Today,
it's so easy to say, 'Photography instantly changed the way people
understood everything,' but I want to argue that it took a long
time for viewers to embrace and accept it," said Sandweiss.
Her book follows photography's early forms, such as
daguerreotypes, as they entered into a crowded field of 19th century illustration
that included drawings, paintings, lithographs, topographical drawings, and engravings.
Compared to these narrative and fictive views that reconfirmed existing cultural
beliefs, Sandweiss contends, the static literalism of daguerreotypes —unique
images on small metal plates —was uninteresting to a public hungry for exciting
stories of America's expanding presence in the west.
As technology advanced through the negative and half-tone
processes, photographs could be printed on paper and published, and —perhaps
most importantly —words could be attached to them, allowing photography
to become a more narrative medium that could compete, for instance, with the
popular illustrated dime novels of the time.
Sandweiss asserts that the practices of collecting and
the selective use of images by historians, anthropologists, and art historians
have obscured the original visual and literary narratives created by 19th century
photographers, whose work was typically assembled in albums or viewed in a series
of images rather than as a single photograph displayed on a museum wall.
"I want to rehistoricize photography and ask: in
the 19th century, how would you have encountered this image, and how would you
have understood it? These images were parts of complex arguments about 'manifest
destiny,' about the necessity of westward expansion, and about the necessary
disappearance of native cultures. I think that context has been lost by many
present researchers," says Sandweiss.
Drawing on more than fifteen years of archival research
in historical societies, libraries, and museums, Picture Stories will be the
first broadly conceived overview that historicizes 19th century photography and
examines how it gained cultural authority depicting the lands and peoples of
the American West. Sandweiss teaches American studies and history at Amherst
College.
Affiliation at time of award: Professor of American Studies
and History, Amherst College
Return to Resident Scholars
2000-2001.
