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CONCLUSION ARCHIVE STYLE T he preceding chapters have argued that the historical circumstances of survey production fostered new pictorial approaches. Makers of survey pictures had to satisfy vague and contradictory bureaucratic needs, adapt old habits to new tasks, and address viewers with disparate expectations, including some who doubted the pictures’ value and legitimacy as public records. The forces shaping new approaches came both from above, in the directives and filtering of supervisors, and from below, in the ingenuity and recalcitrance of employees. Because the pictures that resulted bore traces of conflict and accommodation, they operated as rhetorical prisms. Viewed from the top of the bureaucracy, they meant one thing; viewed from the position of the draftsman or photographer, they meant another. Each of the three practitioners who nominally organize this study responded to a set of unfamiliar demands by drawing on the matrix of dynamic graphic practices in which he was embedded. Each spliced together conventions from different technical disciplines to reconfigure the survey picture as a sign. In making his drawings, Schott grafted specimen drawings and astronomical icons onto topographic displays to situate the viewer on discursive boundaries. O’Sullivan incorporated conventions from other survey practices to depict mastery of the West as the distilled effect of graphic work. Years later, Jones strove to make the photograph a diagrammatic template to register seismic disturbance, isolating and temporally locating momentous terrestrial shifts in tiny displacements and fissures. The socially compromised positions of these practitioners informed their efforts to construct a new semiotic for the survey picture. These skilled employees, who were at the la191 Kelsey, Archive Style 4/11/07 10:51 AM Page 191 borious core of a national effort to define and celebrate the boundaries, natural resources, and economic future of the United States, never fully suppressed the incongruity of their position. Economically insecure and marked as peripheral in the national social order, they found themselves caught up in programmatic schemes to extend or consolidate federal authority. Asked to deliver representations of a governmental power that obscured their own labor and diminished its value, they responded ambiguously, with brilliant service , improvised accommodation, and crafty resistance. Some nomenclature may be useful in articulating the differences in the three practices. I would call the boundary views by Schott, which emphasize syntactical arrangements of motifs, hieroglyphic. Drawing on pictorial habits of Romanticism, the hieroglyphic approach responded to the challenge of integrating indexical markers of both natural and artificial structures with iconic representations of individuated specimens. O’Sullivan’s survey photographs, with their preference for legibly marked and measured surfaces, might be called graphometric. This approach responded to the difficulties of making photography a survey instrument that could represent the process and benefits of such core survey activities as measurement, mapping, and geographic inventory. Finally, the earthquake photographs by Jones, which stress the eruption of anomaly in a regular visual field, could properly be termed registral. The registral approach responded to the challenge of representing a recent change in terrestrial structure as an event. The terms hieroglyphic, graphometric , and registral are, of course, reductive, and they refer to sets of pictures, not to personal styles. Although each set of pictures tells us much about the historical moment when it was produced, none is representative of survey pictorial production at the time. Each chapter identifies the stylistic features that distinguish the set it discusses from the work of peers addressing similar material. The book thus sets the drawings by Schott against those by Möllhausen and Schuchard, the photographs by O’Sullivan against those by Watkins and Jackson, and the photographs by Jones against those by Howland, Wilson, and Cook. If I have declined to sketch out the “typical” survey illustration or photograph from each of the three historical moments, that is because there was none. Each practitioner was in some way uncertain about how best to proceed, and each survey pictorial practice had its quirks. I claim only that the borrowings and graphic values of concern to this book crop up with exceptional frequency in the three practices on which it focuses. Future scholarship may unearth other innovations in the practices that constitute the background of the present study. The pictures from the three sets I analyze here are important because they tested limits of representation. Schott’s hieroglyphic approach retained habits of Romantic obsession (which emphasize the particulars of experience) even as it pursued new protocols of territorial determination. O’Sullivan’s graphometric style...

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