During the 19th century, the ideology of Manifest Destiny became integral to the American nationalist movement. The Manifest Destiny was an American belief, that the states were destined to expand across the continent.
In 1848-1855, the gold rush was discovered in California. People then began flocking to the states by late 1848.
The scale of the land and its extreme nature became harder to control than gentle quaintness of the picturesque tradition. The American west offered possibilities to create symbolic landscape imagery, but also to document those explorations. Many photographers sent government expeditions to the Weston territories, photographing scenery of Colorado, Nevada, Arizona and new Mexico. This showed many photographers surveyed the land and the needed to bring a massive area of land under political and cultural control.
During 1867, photographs specialized in unspoiled nature and extreme landscapes. Photos were seen as sublime in scale, presence and bereft, but explained evidence of settlement. This was known as the starting point of the begging process to gain control over nature.
During the romanticism era the style was known as an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated at the end of the 18th century in Europe, but gained strength in reaction to the growing impact of the industrial revolution. Photos were noticed as a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature and heroic individuals / artists whose pioneering examples would elevate society. The romanticism style emphasized intuition, imagination and feeling, the movement reached America by the early 19th century and was aligned with the notion of the sublime. The term sublime referred to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation.
The concept of the sublime as an aesthetic quality of nature was first brought into prominence during the 18th century. Edmund Burke's concept of the sublime was developed in `A Philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful (1756). He discussed the imagination and how the thought was moved to awe and instilled with a degree of horror. The sublime inspired horror, but also created pleasure, emphasizing emotional quality of fear and attraction.
An artist that was inspired by the romantic movement was an English landscape painter called Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851). He regarded the romantic era as a preference to impressionism. His work was characterised by a chromatic palette and broadly applied washes of paint and notion of scale and destruction. During his work of art, natural catastrophes and phenomena fascinated him, and therefore emphasized emotion as trepidation, horror, terror and awe the viewers experience by confronting the sublimity of untamed nature.
When viewing William Henry Jacksons work in 1883, you notice his involvement in government expeditions and also his establishment of National parks. I love viewing Jacksons work as the photographer presents the American west an untouched, nearly empty, massive and unregulated. He establishes not only the landscape dealing with astonishment but also connoting pain and danger, similar o the thought process of Joseph Mallord William Turner.
During 1867 Carleton Walkins produced a photo named `best General view, Yosemite Valley`. Since the publish of this photo Landscape had become a place where the viewer had a symbolic state of mind connecting with the ideal presence of god. People believed, Isolation delivered inner light and true insights into nature.
Ansel Adams was a member of the f64 group and was known for his strikingly detailed photographs of the American west. The photos were seen as “ Pictorial testimony of inspiration and redemptive power”. Adams was the photographer that developed the zone System. This was a way of determine exposure and adjustment of contrast for final prints. The resulting clarity and depth characterized his photos and the work of those to whom he taught the system to.
Since this creation the f64 group where introduced, and an artistic movement was produced. Photographers gathered passing their work on technical and stylistic perfection. The style was characterised by sharp focus, and was carefully framed producing precise exposed images of natural forms and found objects.
In (1886-1958) Edward Weston created images that mastered the idea of Transcendentalism. The grand scale of nature gave attention to detail. The images celebrated the small objects in the natural scene and the elements of nature portrayed a mystical presence as part of a larger transcendental unity of being. The extreme American desert transformed into something spiritual and mysterious, using primary elements of sand and light into fixing this moment of time and space. During this era the play of light, creation of patterned texture intrigued viewers and created contrast an d interest and a metaphysical presence. Edward Weston made elements of the natural distinct and transformed scenery, highlighting ever-presence concern and a sense of unity and form. His images show great use of detail and emphasizes equal significance almost creating abstract imagery. This style was known as a loss of reality, but as an extraction, a concentration and an abstract of common elements verging towards form.
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