Geology, Photography, and Environmental Rhetoric in the American West of 1860-1890

The geological surveys of the American West in the 1860s-80s are photographically illustrated scientific and technical documents that impose colonizing metaphors upon “natural” areas and resources-metaphors that continue to be contested today in Sierra Club calendar views of Yosemite peaks and in contemporary Congressional ddbates over mining rights and royalties on public Westem lands. Photographic images by William Henry Jackson, Timothy O'Sullivan, and others are central to the survey reports and are here read not so much as products of individual artistic or aesthetic sensibility, but more as thetoncat products of economic, ideological, and political forces in the decades after the American Civil War.