Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850–1890 by Robin Kelsey (review)

Book Reviews Jesús F. de la Teja, Editor Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850–1890. By Robin Kelsey. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Pp. 286. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 978-0-52024-935-6. $49.95, cloth.) The paintings, prints, and photographs produced by U.S. exploring expeditions during the nineteenth century have long since found their way into numerous museum exhibitions, from fine art treatment at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to the many documentary exhibits in history museums across the country. Artists of the Mexican Boundary Survey, the Pacific Railroad Surveys, and the great post-Civil War surveys of the West, among others, have been the subject of many studies, and various claims have been made about them, from the possibility that William Henry Jackson’s photographs and Thomas Moran’s paintings influenced Congress to establish the nation’s first national park at Yellowstone to the contention that many of the survey photographs anticipated the twentieth-century modernist aesthetic. By examining the works of artist Arthur Schott and the photographers Timothy O’Sullivan and little-known C. C. Jones, Robin Kelsey, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of Humanities at Harvard University, demonstrates how “the practical imperatives and social organization of survey work spurred pictorial innovation.” Schott is a particularly interesting case because of the unusual and often overlooked outline engravings published after his ink drawings in Maj. William H. Emory’s Report on the United States and Mexico Boundary Survey (1857). The engravings depict the various boundary monument sites—supposedly accurate enough that the general sites might be located even if the monument were moved or destroyed. The viewer’s attention, however, is drawn to the detailed depictions of vegetation in the foreground of each engraving, which Kelsey says reflects Schott’s passion for botany and his unstated goal of inventorying New World plants. The drawings serve two purposes—Emory’s and Schott’s—with the botanical illustrations providing a Romantic character that coexists with Emory’s need for accurate documentation. Kelsey employs a similar approach in the analysis of O’Sullivan’s and Jones’s photographs. O’Sullivan’s work from the Powell, King, and Wheeler surveys is equally complex, seemingly juxtaposing his enthusiasm for the Western movement (he and his parents were Irish immigrant participants) with the chagrin he often felt while working on the same survey with well-born Americans who frequently were graduates of West Point or Yale. Kelsey suggests that the “flatness *jan 09 11/26/08 12:00 PM Page 305 and the distillation of form” in O’Sullivan’s photographs enhanced their political and promotional prowess and that the federal bureaucracy enthusiastically displayed and published them, while those that might have been inspired by his more hardscrabble background were left in the archives for historians to discover decades later. Kelsey makes a similar distinction with regard to Jones’s photographs. Jones, he says, was attempting to illustrate “seismic disturbance” in his photographs of the 1886 Charleston earthquake by showing “frontal planes, repetitive structure, orthogonal order, and inconspicuous or diagrammatic signs of damage,” rather than by showing outright destruction, such as the collapsed walls and façades that other photographers showed. Jones arranged his scenes as geometric shapes so that the viewer would realize that the slightly askew vertical line, where the corner of the house does not align with the foundation, particularly noticeable because of the regularity that Jones has introduced into his composition, documented earthquake damage. Kelsey is dealing with tricky and fuzzy concepts, but he succeeds in showing the influence that society, aesthetics, and individual taste and talent, among other things, had on what might have otherwise been “the dry soil of government work.” Amon Carter Museum Ron Tyler Photography on the South Texas Frontier: Images from the Witte Museum Collection. By Bruce M. Shackleford. (San Antonio: Maverick Publishing, 2007. Pp. 112. Color and black-and-white plates, illustrations. ISBN 978-1-89327-145-6. $38.95, cloth.) For a historian, referring to something as a “coffee table book” is as much an accusation as a description. It connotes a glossy and oversized, but ultimately superficial, book meant to add...