Archive Style: Photographs & Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850-1890 (review)

It's hard out there for a bureaucrat. Whether or not you do something of value, you need to promote yourself constantly and create the support and conditions for success. In his recent books of advice for government agencies, Mark Moore maps the terrain and stresses the active role the agency can play in creating value, generating broad support, and meeting the demands of the authorizers and funders (see Creating Public Value:Strategic Management in Government, 1995). Though focused on the present, Moore's ideas may prove of use in looking at the past. In Archive Style, Robin Kelsey shows us three Nineteenth-Century artists—Arthur Schott, Timothy O'Sullivan, and the little-known C. C. Jones—building styles that respond to and resist the authorizing environment.

This patronage study is certainly not reductive or narrow in its approach to art. Kelsey sees institutional culture as broadly engaged in all aspects of the nation and the wider visual world. Consequently, his readings of images are magnificently rich in references to art trends, race and class, boundary-making, nation-building, philosophy, economic desires, and sheer visual energy. He finds a "recalcitrant ingenuity" (193) in the work of the survey artists which requires vigorous interpretation to describe their direct programs and their rebellious indirection.

The direct involvement of Congress in appropriating funds for art in reports figures highly in the chapters on Schott and O'Sullivan. Schott, doing a series of engravings of the Mexico/Arizona boundary, had to balance the appeal of illustration in generating support for the survey work with the backlash against "ornamental" art. While the head of the border survey promoted the art as a valuable record of the boundary, he and the artist valued and stressed the record of plant and geological life and its status as microcosm and marker of Manifest Destiny. A fascinating discussion of the use of fireworks on the ground and stars in the art to mark longitude pulls together the competing motives on the project.

O'Sullivan appealed to Congress by creating photographs that seemed to favor information over aesthetic appeal, unlike William Henry Jackson, who did the opposite and was vigorously attacked by funders. So the careful observing activity of surveyors in O'Sullivan contrasts to the scanning gaze of the tourist seen in Jackson's Yellowstone images.

The photographs of the Charleston earthquake damage by C. C. Jones ignore grand, melodramatic images of destruction and show cracks, fissures and details not easily seen. This choice leaves a need for scientific expertise provided in lectures by his boss, W. J. McGee. The images, aiming at a sober scientific appeal, also provide potent portraits of the cracks fissures in society from labor and racial unrest. Many readers will find this chapter the most interesting of a compelling book. Though there may be some debate about Kelsey's idea of "style," most will find great riches in his dense readings of images and pleasure and meaning in the tales of individuals making a creative mark while doing the work of their agencies, a situation that many readers will understand in a personal way.