How the West was Won. Reinventing the Myth of William Henry Jackson.

A thorough discussion of Peter B. Hales book ""William Henry
Jackson and the Transformation of the American Landscape''
(1988). The reviewer acknowledges the fact that Jackson's
photographs helped to establish a historical basis for the
recognition of photography as a distinctive American art form,
carried on later by Ansel Adams and Caponigro, and entering the
photographic canon with Szarkowski's exhibition ""The
Photographer in the American Landscape'' (1963). But the
reviewer also discusses the histories to which Jackson belongs:
histories based on the myth of the American Frontier as the
source of America's exceptional culture (and as such, a
cumulative construction), and Jackson's contribution to that
myth. Femininist historians, geographers and new students of
American studies have managed to deconstruct this myth. Hales is
criticised for ""resurrecting assumptions that much recent work
has succesfully undermined'', and for reviving an ""antique
ideology''.
Univ. of Rochester


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