Their faces look out across a chasm of time. Stern and often stiff,
they wear the high collars and hoop skirts, buckskins and
ceremonial feathers of another era. The names of some are
familiar--Teddy Roosevelt, Mark Twain, Sitting Bull, Annie Oakley.
The names of others may be less well known, but they played a
significant role in re-creating the American West. These are all
people of the West, and their portraits give us a unique glimpse
into a lost time and place.
"Faces of the Frontier" showcases more than 120 photographic
portraits of leaders, statesmen, soldiers, laborers, activists,
criminals, and others, all posed before the cameras that made their
way to nearly every mining shanty-town and frontier outpost on the
prairie. Drawing primarily on the collection of the National
Portrait Gallery, this book depicts many of the people who helped
transform the West between the end of the Mexican War and passage
of the Indian Citizenship Act.
Accompanying the portraits are an introduction and two essays
that provide historical context and help frame their
interpretation. Frank Goodyear explores how photography influenced
Americans' understanding of the West by giving the region a face
and by shaping public responses to western issues. Richard White
questions the notion that these photographs accurately represent
individuals and argues that the portraits' subjects participated in
a process that idealized them as types.
This handsome volume is not only a record of the people we
associate with the West during a remarkably formative eighty years
but also a key to understanding what Americans then saw in the
West, and how they saw themselves.
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