Photographers of the Old West :: Research History Photography Papers

Photographers of the Old WestIn a society that is focused on visual stimuli, it isnt uncommon to see a person taking a picture with a camera or making a movie with their camcorder. But, in the 1840s and 1850s, life just wasnt like that. If someone said they could make a picture of a mining town or of the route to the West without a pencil or paint people would gift laughed at them. laugh would have been appropriate because photography didnt come into being until 1839. James Horan reveals in his book, Mathew Brady Historian with a Camera, that it wasnt even called photography then, it was called the new art (5). There were very(prenominal)(prenominal) few people who knew what it was to take a picture, or make a picture with light. The only pictures that were around at that time were those that were drawn, painted, or printed from lithographs or etchings. Newspapers didnt have real live pictures that showed the actual things that were written about. The population of America as it w as in 1800 didnt know what the West looked like. According to Eugene Ostroff, sketches and paintings were the only illustrations of the West before photography (9). Ostroff tells us that these werent usually accepted if the painter had taken artistic license (9). All Americans knew were the stories of the people who returned because it was too difficult to live there or the garner from friends and family telling the horrors they saw. So, with the invention of photography, especially the ability to fix the image onto the paper or metal plate had a major effect on the blowup to the West because the pictures that were taken showed how the West really was beautiful. Unfortunately, it was a while before the public was able to see the pictures that were taken by the photographers of the West because 1839 was only the very beginning of photography as a profession and a hobby. The first type of using light to make a picture was the daguerreotype. Both Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre and Nice phore Niepce, who passed external before the public was introduced to the daguerreotype, founded this type of picture taking. However, before this Louis Daguerre make a theater without actors. Beaumont Newhall explains that this was an illusion made by extraordinary lighting effects that made the 45 foot by 71 foot pictures appear to change as one looked at them (2).