Faces of the Frontier: Photographic Portraits from the American West, 1845–1924
by Frank H. Goodyear III, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2009, $45.
Published in cooperation with the Smithsonian Institution, Faces of the Frontier is the companion book to a recent exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. [www.npg.si.edu]. The book presents more than 120 portraits of men and women—explorers and warriors, statesmen and Indian chiefs, industrialists and conservationists, lawmen and outlaws, writers, artists and actors—who helped transform the American West in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Of course, the photographers themselves (including Mathew Brady, Charles Bell, Edward Curtis, Timothy O’Sullivan and Edward Weston) helped define the era, and several appear here as subjects or in self-portraits. Stanford University history professor Richard White and National Portrait Gallery curator Frank Goodyear III open the book with background essays on the craft and impact of early portraiture, while Goodyear and fellow photo researchers provide captions for the images.
The portraits (daguerreotype, tintype, ambrotype, stereograph, silver prints) are grouped into four general themes —“Land,” “Exploration,” “Discord” and “Possibilities.” Readers will recognize popular images of Buffalo Bill Cody, Red Cloud, George Custer, Geronimo, Annie Oakley and other Western icons, but many portraits capture lesser-known subjects. Standout images include a circa 1865 silver albumen print of Galen Clark, “Guardian of Yosemite,” leaning against the massive trunk of the “Grizzly Giant,” a sequoia that remains standing in the park’s Mariposa Grove. Engineer William Mulholland, brainchild of Los Angeles’ ever-controversial water-management system, poses in 1910 with a surveyor’s theodolite in the California countryside. In a 1921 studio print, celebrated Western landscape painter Thomas Moran, spruced up in suit and tie, holds a spattered easel and sports the unkempt beard and hairstyle of a passionate artist. Toward the back of the book, a few pages past portraits of real-life outlaws, cinema gunslingers William S. Hart and Tom Mix strike pistolero poses on facing pages.
Despite Goodyear’s assurance that “portraiture was never a static tradition,” the process itself was by necessity static, requiring subjects to remain still long moments as chemical plates recorded their aspect. The resulting images comprise a valuable, if seldom dynamic, historical record of the developing West.
Originally published in the April 2010 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.
