It’s worryingly easy to forget, in our present age of digital ephemera, that travel has not always been recorded on a whim and reproduced in an instant. Some 100 years ago it would have taken months of complex planning and no small amount of improvisation to travel through the Untied States – let alone to archive one’s experiences for posterity. This summer a new exhibition at New York’s George Eastman Museum, entitled Photography and America’s National Parks, serves as a heartwarming reminder of tourism as it once existed.
The show’s principal concern is actually in celebrating the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service, which it does through a collection of images exploring the role of photography in understanding these landscapes. The selection on display, however – from Audley D. Stewart’s brilliantly captioned 1930 snapshot George Eastman and companions riding through Wawona Tree in Yosemite National Park, to a series of vibrant illustrations of rolling hills and towering mountains for various periodicals – is as much a tribute to travelling in the days of yore as it is to the parks themselves.
Roger Minick photographs sightseers peering over the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls; Edward Weston shoots overbearing sand dunes in Death Valley; Eadweard Muybridge, one of photography’s most seminal figureheads, shoots the reflection of a skyline in its neighbouring lake as early as 1872. There’s no question that the United States is in possession of some of the world's most awe-inspiring natural environments. "From Yosemite being set aside as publicly held land in 1864 to Pinnacles National Park as the most recent addition in 2013, the lands that make up America's national parks have been interpreted and enjoyed through photographs for more than 150 years," the museum explains. "Spanning the 1860s to the present, this exhibition illuminates the history of the most significant national parks through lush landscape photographs."
Happy Monday! #AnOtherHappyMonday
Photography and America's National Parks runs until October 2, 2016 at the George Eastman Museum, New York. The accompnying book is available to buy now, published by Aperture.
