Reviews for Print the legend

The average rating for Print the legend based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-10-04 00:00:00 Jason Swedin In Martha A. Sandweiss' Print the Legend: Photography and the American West, the author introduces her book as "a story about photography and the American West, a new medium and a new place that came of age together in the nineteenth century" (2). In her introduction, Sandweiss clarifies that her book is not a comprehensive history of photography in the West, but rather, she narrows her scope of interest to an exploration of public photographs'those used for exhibition, publication, or sale'from the mid-1840s to the early 1890s that portray the West and shaped popular thinking about this mythical region of the North American continent. Her main argument centers on the assertion that despite the technological advancements of photography in the second half of the nineteenth century, the American public consistently preferred other two-dimensional pictorial images'namely paintings, prints, panoramas, sketches, and scientific drawings'of the West that offered more dramatic views with familiar nationalistic narratives. Although photographs may appear more precise than other mediums of visual representation, "they often seemed to be insufficiently informative, unable to depict what remained known or felt but ultimately unseen" (10). For these reasons, photos were not immediately triumphant in the visual marketplace of the nineteenth century. In addition to her central thesis, Sandweiss also contends for photographs' relevance and utility as primary sources for historical research. She acknowledges, however, that they need to be just as rigorously analyzed for bias as written sources. In order to demonstrate the importance of her methodology'using photographs to convey history'as well as to prove her central thesis concerning photography's emergence and initial unpopularity in portraying the West, Sandweiss organizes her book into seven chapters that roughly break down into two parts. The first three chapters chronicle the daugerrean era of photography when private opportunists attempted and failed to use the new technology of photography to capture marketable images of the West during the Mexican American War and its bounteous resources following the War. The second part of her book's organization includes four chapters that address the advancement of the wet-plate negative process used on late 1850s government exploring expeditions, the marketing of America's economic future, the cataloguing of Native Americans, and the use of photographs in illustrated books to depict predictive tales of "the West that could be" (3). Through Sandweiss' analysis of photographs and other visual materials'both those still existing and those that have since perished'in addition to traditional historic texts, she demonstrates the losing battles of the earliest photographs of the American West that would only find a place of respected value just before the turn of the century "as document and as art, as economic prospect and as political argument'in the cultural imaginings of [the West]" (4). In the seventh chapter and epilogue of the book, "Western Photography and the Illustrated Book," Sandweiss discusses the nineteenth century "gap between the technological capacity to convey certain sorts of visual information and the more conservative popular expectations for what images should look like" (324). In drawing from the 1962 film, John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), Sandweiss concludes that in resisting the realistic images of photography, nineteenth century Americans "chose to print the legend, not the fact" (324). In fact, in the epilogue to the book, Sandweiss clarifies that the West continued to be misrepresented by photography into the twentieth century with nostalgic photographs romanticizing cowboy life. In other words, the mythical West survives in reverse due to present day interpretations of nineteenth century photography. As Sandweiss concludes: "If, in the mid-nineteenth century, [photographs] seemed unable to alter Americans' collective imagings of the West, they have come over time to inform and shape our master narrative of the nation's western past and to fix it in the collective imagination" (343).

Review # 2 was written on 2012-04-12 00:00:00 Paul Paiement Methodologically important for making the distinction between seeing photos both through and in history. For example, any given photo can be situated within its historical moment, with respect to that particular "period eye," but also the meaning of any given photo changes through time, making them very historically dynamic. Sandweiss' narrative carefully pulls apart the ways that photos of the west fed into a dominant narrative about the necessity for westward expansion into an area without a human history, and shows how modern historians who ignore the constructedness of this narrative (such as Ken Burns, which she discusses in the epilogue) feed into the presumptions such photos helped stabilize. I think Sandweiss strikes an excellent balance between acknowledging how a historian's interests are framed by the present and bringing to light historical evidence that challenges, complicates, and reveals the roots of dominant narratives about the west. In my book, that's one of the major goals of most good history. However, the first four chapters are redundant and boring unless you are really, really interested in daguerreotypes. I would recommend skimming them, and getting into the meat of the book which starts at chapter 5.