Hoover Dam: The Photographs of Ben Glaha, and: Glen Canyon Dammed: Inventing Lake Powell and the Canyon Country (review)

Hoover Dam: The Photographs of Ben Glaha. By Barbara Vilander. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999. Pp. xvi+169. $50/$24.95.

Glen Canyon Dammed: Inventing Lake Powell and the Canyon Country. By Jared Farmer. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999. Pp. xxvii+269. $26.95.

If you pick up either of these two books to learn about the science of dam building or water policy, you will be disappointed. You should, however, consider reading them for the new perspectives they bring to the history of dams and dam building. With Hoover Dam: The Photographs of Ben Glaha, Barbara Vilander, an art historian, adds to a very small but interesting literature on photos of modern technology. Similarly, in Glen Canyon Dammed: Inventing Lake Powell and the Canyon Country Jared Farmer asks new questions about changes to social and natural worlds that were part and parcel of dam building. He combines environmental history and tourism studies to examine the history of traveling in the Glen Canyon area of southern Utah--an activity that increased dramatically after the completion of Glen Canyon Dam in the early 1960s.

Ben Glaha took the photos that are Vilander's subject while employed by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that managed the Hoover Dam's construction. Vilander takes a two-pronged approach to her analysis, considering Glaha's photos both as documents of the Bureau of Reclamation and as objects of art. In scope these photographs ranged from panoramic views of the dam site to close-ups of construction techniques. Glaha also shot work routines, equipment and machinery, construction milestones, the government town that served as headquarters for the construction effort, the lake that formed behind the dam, and prominent visitors. The breadth of distribution of Glaha's photos matched the breadth of his subjects. Major newspapers, government and corporate promotional pamphlets, scholarly books, government-produced slide shows, museums, expositions, and engineering, artistic, and general circulation magazines all featured his work.

Vilander's analysis of the role that Glaha's photographs played for the Bureau of Reclamation focuses on public relations, and here she misses an opportunity. She emphasizes that "the Bureau's 'party line' was to produce images that addressed structural and monetary concerns. . . . Glaha understood the Bureau's parameters and worked within them" (p. 13). While this is an interesting and important argument, it glosses over the engineering significance of the photos. This latter use aided the literal construction of Hoover Dam, given the geographical division of engineering work practiced by the Bureau of Reclamation, just as the public-relations use contributed to the construction of Hoover Dam as part of American culture.

In her artistic analysis, Vilander locates Glaha's photographs in the "machine aesthetic" tradition. Glaha appreciated the work of Margaret Bourke-White, Lewis Hine, and Charles Sheeler and used techniques similar to theirs. He, in turn, influenced Bourke-White, Ansel Adams, and William Wollett, and his influence spread through exhibitions of his photographs at the DeYoung Museum of Art in San Francisco and elsewhere, as well as by his presence for a term as an instructor at the Artists' Cooperative Gallery in San Francisco. But here again Vilander misses an opportunity. She mentions the vast number of photographs taken of all large government construction projects during this period but fails to discuss the artistic merit of that larger body of work. Was Glaha's interaction with recognized artists exceptional or commonplace?

Regardless of missed opportunities, Vilander and her publisher have done the historical community a real favor by assembling seventy-two crisp, full-page reproductions of photographs of Hoover Dam and making them widely available.

Jared Farmer has also looked at many photographs. Farmer's tastes, however, run to landscapes and natural wonders, such as the 290-foot natural-stone Rainbow Bridge. Analyzing these...