Description
Book SynopsisAcross the West and Toward the North compares how photographers in Norway and the United States represented the environment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when once-remote wildernesses were first surveyed, developed, and photographed. Making images while traversing almost inaccessible terrain—often on foot and for months at a time—photographers created a compelling visual language that came to symbolize each nation.
In this edited volume, Norwegian and American scholars offer the first study of the striking parallels in the production, distribution, and reception of these modern expressions of landscape and nationhood. In recognizing how landscape photographs were made meaningful to international audiences—such as tourists, visitors to world's fairs, scientists, politicians, and immigrants—the authors challenge notions of American exceptionalism and singularly nationalistic histories.
The book includes stunning photographs of mountainous landscapes, glaciers, and forests, punctuated by signs of human development and engineering, with more than one hundred rarely seen plates by photographers Knud Knudsen, Anders Beer Wilse, Timothy O. Sullivan, Charles R. Savage, and others.
Trade ReviewAcross the West and Toward the North examines how Norwegian and American photographers pictured the landscape in a period of earthshaking technological transformation and expanding infrastructure. Shared artistic strategies are revealed through this smart cross-cultural study, which challenges entrenched notions that nationalism was uniquely expressed and understood in the landscape photography of each country. This book anticipates growing transnational scholarship resulting from the bicentennial commemoration of Norwegian immigration to North America in 2025." - Leslie Ann Anderson, Director of Collections, Exhibitions, and Programs, National Nordic Museum
"This international collaboration reveals fascinating parallels among nineteenth-century American and Scandinavian landscape photographers whose shared motifs—sublime geological phenomena, ethnographic and landscape tourism, wayfarers, railroads, bridges, roads, and inhabited landscapes—affirm communal, transnational connections. Such images featuring environmental exploration and exploitation, underscoring the delicate balance of nature and culture, have lasting relevance." - Theresa Leininger-Miller, professor, Art History, University of Cincinnati
Table of Contents
- List of Plates
- List of Figures
- Foreword by Marthe Tolnes Fjellestad
- Acknowledgments
- 1. Introduction: Views from Across the West and Toward the North—Shannon Egan
- 2. Ragged Places and Rugged Men: Photography, the American West, and Masculine Mettle—James R. Swensen
- 3. Traveling with Knud Knudsen: Roads and Railways in Norwegian Photography—Torild Gjesvik
- 4. Getting Soaked at Yellowstone: Photography and the Making of the Tourist Landscape—Elizabeth Hutchinson
- 5. Nature and Photography: Anders Beer Wilse’s Photographic Equivalents—Trond Erik Bjorli
- 6. Views Across Continents: Ten Photographs—Marthe Tolnes Fjellestad
- 7. Dwelling in the Photographic Landscape—Elizabeth Hutchinson
- 8. Lieutenant von Hahnke’s Ill-Fated Bicycle Trip—Marthe Tolnes Fjellestad
- 9. On a Summer Snowbank: A View toward the Glacier—Shannon Egan
- 10. Carl Abraham Pihl and Andrew J. Russell: Railway Landscapes—Torild Gjesvik
- 11. Landscapes with More than Mountains: Give and Take—James R. Swensen
- Photographers’ Biographies by—Shannon Egan and Marthe Tolnes Fjellestad
- Select Bibliography
- List of Contributors
- Index
