True West
Yes, it’s technically of the coffee table ilk, and yes, you’ll pay out the nose for the hifalutin design (’tis the season). But Martha Sandweiss‘ Print the Legend (Yale University Press, $39.95) also happens to be a sophisticated and engaging exploration of photography and the West not seen since the Goetzmans (pere et fils) offered up West of the Imagination in the mid-Eighties. With its interdisciplinary focus, multicultural breadth, and the assumption that cultural images are essentially powerful social constructions, Print the Legend lays bare a trove of historical photographs as “sources of meaning in and of themselves.” Drawing on her curatorial experience at Fort Worth’s Amon Carter Museum, Sandweiss, who now teaches American studies at Amherst, argues that 19th-century photographs shaped “broader cultural meanings of the West” that subsequently influenced the pictures that photographers shot. This tail-chaser of a thesis is pretty much standard cultural-studies fluff. Nonetheless, through lucid prose, an obvious and genuine admiration for her documents, and a tendency to push her thesis with Sisyphean determination, she decisively shows how “photographers working in the West understood the potential historical value of their work.” At times, the bulk of her ambitious project threatens to roll back upon itself, but in the end we too see the historical value of these underappreciated and beautiful documents. Or at least a really handsome book.
This article appears in December 13 • 2002.