That the histories of photography and of the American West are intertwined is a truism in histories and theories of photography, one most frequently evoked in studies on expeditionary and geological survey photographs by such notables as William Henry Jackson and Timothy O’Sullivan. Rachel McLean Sailor’s copiously illustrated history of western regional photography does much to ground that truism in the particulars of the medium’s technological evolution and in the region’s events.

Meaningful Places: Landscape Photographers in the Nineteenth-Century American West primarily concerns the kinds of photographs that populate local historical societies. These seemingly “uninteresting and uncomplicated” photographs document people and events whose purpose often appears “boring” and inaccessible to contemporary viewers (xviii). Going beyond the familiar caveat that “landscape is a cultural construction,” however, Sailor examines the ways that local photographers recorded and shaped place-making by settlers and their de facto communities. Focusing particularly on the photographic construction of a series of regional and national western monuments—the Cahokia Mounds, Crater Lake, and the Grand Canyon, among others—Meaningful Places explores how local photographers helped shape not only how Easterners saw the western landscape but also how settlers connected to western landscape as local. In the process, Meaningful Places convincingly narrates its particular history of western landscape, with a conclusion on Ansel Adams’s modernist bridging of topical and avant-garde paradigms that suggests ways in which pioneer photography continues to inform contemporary landscape photography.

Meaningful Places begins, fittingly, in St. Louis, the literal and symbolic “Gateway to the West.” The first chapter on daguerreotypes by Thomas Easterly focuses on his documentation of the destruction of the “Big Mound” in 1869 for landfill to facilitate railroad and urban expansion. A striking and characteristic feature of the local St. Louis landscape, the Big Mound was one of several such structures in the area built by ancient mound-building cultures. This early chapter establishes multiple aspects of the book’s argument as Sailor compares successive daguerreotypes of the Big Mound’s demolition to earlier picturesque “views” of Chouteau’s Pond—the intended landfill site—and later unpicturesque shots of the pond as a drained swamp fronting a burgeoning St. Louis skyline. Easterly’s daguerreotype series of the Big Mound’s whittling down from a mesa-like structure to little more than a narrow pinnacle, before becoming a site of absence, invariably includes people—as do a great many of the early western regional landscape photographs discussed in the book. Yet, the locals’ eager positioning of themselves around and atop the mound in Easterly’s daguerreotypes is complexly registered by Sailor as documenting the mound’s demolition as an event of local interest rather than as merely the triumphal posturing of Manifest Destiny.

As chapters on Joel Emmons Whitney’s carte-de-visite photographs of the falls at Lake Minnehaha and Peter Britt’s wet collodion prints of Crater Lake demonstrate, the cultural meaning of landscape among settlers of the west carried aspects of the Old World sublime as well as national narratives of promise and risk. The Minnesota cataract gained national fame as the subject of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1855 epic poem, The Song of Hiawatha. Though both Whitney and Alexander Hesler photographed the falls on a hike in 1852, Hesler sought to bring national attention to the site while Whitney remained a local photographer, seeking to incite St. Paul area locals to experience the falls. That Longfellow admitted to having “experienced” the site only through the mediation of Whitney’s photographs raises, for Sailor, a “tautology” among poem, photograph, and place, which locals themselves might have considered as they contemplated the falls and other regional sites and sights that held “larger cultural meaning” (40).

In a related fashion, portraitist Peter Britt’s photographs of Crater Lake were produced primarily for a Jacksonville, Oregon, clientele, and herein Sailor reflects on how photographic views, like names, function to claim landscapes. Crater Lake’s isolation initially kept it from national purview, and Britt’s photographs were simultaneously spectacle and lure for Jacksonville residents to make the arduous day journey to visit and therefore identify with “their” regional landscape. Remote yet spectacular, the caldera lake was experienced and photographed primarily from the extinct volcano’s rim. Crater Lake thus marked an end point to a journey, potently symbolizing the frontier’s northwest terminus. By contrast, travel to other monumental landscapes, such as Yosemite, often marked, according to Sailor, the seemingly limitless commencement of a journey, one better reflecting the nation’s imperialist desires. Local photographers conveyed the experience of these sites as sublime in the name of regional western identity, even as these identities were being metonymically subsumed under the nation’s exceptional identity.

Supported by a Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant, Sailor’s careful, historically informative, and impressively insightful readings of individual photographs compellingly establish differences within and between regional photographs. As does Martha Sandweiss in Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), Sailor convincingly yokes specifics of photography’s technological and commercial evolution to specifics of place-making by nascent western communities—from daguerreotype to stereography, from wet-plate collodion to dry, from photographic albums to film, and from Brownie cameras to 35mm. Indeed, Sailor notes that the daguerreotype’s detailed rendering was technically unsuited to framing landscape in accordance with prior paradigms from painting; landscape as a photography genre fully emerges only with later wet-plate collodion processes. The way Meaningful Places chronicles the photographic profession is of additional sociohistorical interest. For many photographers in the west during the nineteenth century, photography was but one of the many ways they made their living. Even so, by century’s end, their work was threatened by increased tourism and the Kodak Brownie. One of the book’s most important conclusions illustrates how Adams shifted the discourse from professional versus amateur photographer to artist versus amateur photographer.

Circulating within the overall technological and chronological framework of Meaningful Places is a seductive imputation of temporal and historical self-consciousness to these photographers—a self-consciousness that anticipates, if it does not fully participate in, high art modernism. Such awareness is argued by evidence of how given photographers negotiated local needs within the technical and commercial possibilities of the medium at given points in time. Thus, Sailor draws an implicit parallel between the “preciousness” of Easterly’s continued use of daguerreotypy, despite its rapid obsolescence by wet-plate collodion, and the ephemerality of the Big Mound as a local landmark (23). The book’s penultimate chapter features the Kolb brothers who included themselves in their photographs as daredevil “pioneer photographers” (109) and “view hunters” (105) precariously suspended above the Grand Canyon in order to capture views unavailable to ordinary, Brownie-toting tourists. The Kolbs, like Easterly and other photographers within the book, are credited with an “awareness” of “the transitional nature of their era” (134) in the face of modernity, as well as with creating new markets for their work.

Sailor’s claim regarding photographer self-consciousness becomes more persuasive in later chapters focused on work produced during and after the “closing” of the western frontier than in those chapters on photography during the trans-Mississippi commencement. Yet the argument varies substantively from one landscape and nascent community to another in ways that avoid totalizing and instead remain intriguingly suggestive. In a lone departure from the book’s focus on national monuments, the fourth chapter, on Solomon Butcher’s Atget-like effort to chronicle the post-1862 homesteading of Custer County, Nebraska, shifts the impetus of historical self-consciousness from photography to “architecture”—namely, to the sod dwellings intended to provide temporary shelter from harsh prairie climes until homesteaders were able to “prove up” their claims with plank homes. Butcher photographed these homesteaders in front of their subterranean sod homes with whatever possessions indicated their status, including cows, plows, and horses. By including the homesteaders’ biographies, Butcher intended to produce a series of photographic albums to which he could offer subscriptions and encourage collecting, but which would also provide immigrants isolated in their acreages with evidence of others sharing their same hopes and fears. Thus, the intended temporary function of sod homes provides the conceptual basis for Sailor’s claim to Butcher’s “consciousness of the passing nature of their era” (81). Left unremarked, however, is that a great many homesteaders failed in their goals or perished.

The complicity of such photographs in Manifest Destiny is clear in critical hindsight. Meaningful Places implicitly acknowledges the many exiled Eastern and non-English-speaking European immigrants to whom fell the task of staking federal claims in so-called Indian Country and for whom the promise of settling or homesteading often resulted in the kinds of poverty and exclusion they had hoped to escape by heading west. Meaningful Places recognizes landscape as not only the symbolic site of differences in cultural meaning but also as the very real site of the United States’ imperial conquest and its contestation by indigenous peoples. Sailor carefully negotiates Native American history by acknowledging in each chapter the very different meanings “cultural landscapes” (xxiv–xxvii) held for indigenous peoples—meanings, she remarks, that photography was not integral in constructing, meanings that were effaced by regional photographers imbuing landscape with local and community significance.

Sailor’s expansive understanding of the contemporary meaning and function of regional photography is likely to provide impetus and model for future scholarship on regional and, in many cases, as yet anonymous photographers. To quote Virginia Woolf, “throughout history, Anonymous was a woman.” As thoroughly researched and historicized as it is, Meaningful Places includes no acknowledgment that many regional photographers, whose work is held in historical societies throughout the American West and yet who remain anonymous, were likely the wives, sisters, and daughters of settlers, soldiers, and surveyors, or, as likely, some of the remarkable independent pioneer women who helped settle and domesticate the American West. Meaningful Places opens an inviting door to inclusive future scholarship.