Ecologies of Photography: Materials, Industries, and Environment in the American West

Photography and the Western environment have long been culturally intertwined, as The Huntington’s collections demonstrate. From early daguerreotypists documenting the boomtowns of the American West and Carleton E. Watkins’ Yosemite prints celebrating a desirable “untouched” landscape to throngs of outdoor Kodakers pouring into national parks and Ansel Adams’ conservation aesthetics, the medium has been closely tied to the environmental imagination of the United States in general and to the American West in particular. In recent years, photo-historians have begun a thorough reexamination of the seemingly favorable Western photographic climate through the lens of its environmental repercussions. “Ecologies of Photography” at once references studies of home and belonging, as well as the ecocritical methodologies that have quickly become fundamental to humanistic studies, especially within the field of American art.

Funding provided by the E. L. and Ruth B. Shannon Research Endowment for Western Programs at The Huntington.

Conference Schedule

Friday, March 1

9 a.m. | Registration and Coffee

9:30 a.m. | Welcome and Remarks

• Susan Juster (The Huntington)
• Monica Bravo (Princeton University) and Carolin Görgen (Sorbonne Université)

10 a.m. | Session 1: Past Made Present

• Moderator: James A. Ganz (Getty Museum)
• Martha “Marni” A. Sandweiss (Princeton University), “How New Is the New History of Western Photography?”
• Elizabeth Hutchinson (Barnard College, Columbia University), “Shooting in the Ice: Photographs from Arctic Revenue Cutters in the Late 19th Century”
• Binh Danh (San Jose State University), “Self Landing: Daguerreotypes on the Western Landscape”

Noon | Lunch

1:30 p.m. | Session 2: Extraction of Materials and Labor

Moderator: Linde Lehtinen (The Huntington)

• Katherine “Kappy” Mintie (Yale University), “Missing the Forest for the Trees: Pulp, Pollution, and Landscape Photography in the Pacific Northwest”
• Alan C. Braddock (William & Mary), “Looking at Cows/Reanimating Gelatin: The Biopolitics of Photographic Emulsion”

3 p.m. | Break

3:30 p.m. | Viewing Session (Speakers Only)

Saturday, March 2

9 a.m. | Registration and Coffee

9:30 a.m. | Session 3: Native Sovereignty

• Moderator: Monica Bravo (Princeton University)
• Jordan Reznick (Grinnell College), “Grinding Stone v. Photograph: Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe Ecological Rights and the Malakoff Diggins Case”
• Emily Cornish (University of Michigan), “Āina and Accession Photography during the Kalākaua Era”
• Cara Romero, Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, “Cara Romero: Inseparable from the Land”

11:30 a.m. | Gallery Session

• Viewing of Cara Romero’s Paso Robles (2021) in “Borderlands” exhibition

Noon | Lunch

1:30 p.m. | Session 4: Against the Classical Landscape

• Moderator: Carolin Görgen (Sorbonne Université)
• Christine Hult-Lewis (Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley), “Copper, Gas, and Fire: Carleton Watkins’ Subterranean Anaconda Mine Photos”
• Yves Figueiredo (Université Paris Cité), “‘Desert in Sight’: The Contribution of Amateur Photography to the Formulation of Ecological Practices”
• Jennifer Tucker (Wesleyan University), “Air Tour of Southern California: Aerial Portraits of the American West by Geoscientist John W. Shelton”

3:30 p.m. | Break

3:45 p.m. | Closing Remarks

• Monica Bravo and Carolin Görgen

Image: Binh Danh, Yosemite Falls, Yosemite, CA (April 15, 2012), 2012, daguerreotype, 8.5 x 6.5 in. The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.