In Joel Snyder’s essay Territorial Photography he discusses The developments in American landscape photography practices from the 1850s to the 1870s.  He begins by explaining how early photographers were from privileged backgrounds and were familiar with tropes of landscape depiction learned from paintings;  the picturesque and the naturalistic.

However, by the mid-1950s photographers were increasingly from less educated backgrounds and this led to a turn to a more factual, realistic and ‘mechanical’ approach to landscape photography.

By the 1860s the value of photography for documentary use was becoming more recognised and thus more practised.  Photography leaned further toward ‘articulation, high finish and precise rendering of detail’.  One photographer to embrace this new direction was Carleton Watkins.  A champion of progress, he was devoted to the idea of developing the land with new railroads and other industrial innovations but did not seem to have considered the impact on the local inhabitants.  Snyder discusses how Watkins’ images show of locations including Utah, Nevada and Yosemite Park show man made infrastructure and the natural landscape coexisting in picturesque harmony alongside each other.

In contrast, Snyder examines the work of Timothy O’Sullivan, who participated in two geological surveys across Nevada, Utah and New Mexico, and whose work depicts the land as bleak and inhospitable.  O’Sullivan was not given any specific instructions or brief but was merely told to ‘give the sense of the place’.

The difference in approach by Watkins and O’Sullivan can clearly be seen in the images below.

Watkins’ image is idyllic and picturesque and follows the traditional landscape composition; even today it could be produced as a picture postcard.

Cathedral Rocks, 2,600ft, Yosemite

In contrast, O’Sullivan’s image defies landscape tradition in using a portrait format and the composition is arranged so that the rock completely blocks the sky.  Unlike Watkins’ image, the landscape looms forebodingly and even the evidence of human  habitation in the form of the Anasazi Indian pueblo does little to convince the viewer that the land is hospitable, not least because of its location at the mouth of the vast cave entrance which diminishes it into insignificance.

Canyon de Chelly, Arizona (1873)

References:

www.britannica.com/biography/Timothy-OSullivan [accessed 18 January 2020]

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/photography-blog/2014/nov/04/carleton-watkins-yosemite-photography-america [accessed 19 January 2020]