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-American West is frontier land - American frontier moved gradually westward decades after the settlement of the first immigrants on the Eastern seaboard in the 17th century - American West as a term was always the area/land beyond that boundary - most often the "American Old West or The Great American West" is used to describe the area west of the Mississippi River during the 19th century -The Frontier Strip are the states in the United States forming a northsouth line from North Dakota to Texas. -In the American Old West, westward from this strip was the frontier of the United States toward the latter part of the 19th century or the Last American Frontier

-during the 19th century, the ideology of Manifest Destiny became integral to the American nationalist movement -Manifest Destiny was American belief that the United States was destined to expand across the continent

- gold was discovered in California establishing the California Gold Rush (18481855) and people started flocking to the state in by late 1848

-scale of the land and its extreme nature was in many respects harder to control than gentle quaintness of the Picturesque tradition --the American West offered possibility to create symbolic landscape imagery but also document those explorations --many photographers sent on government expeditions to the western territories, photographing the scenery of Colorado, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico as acts of surveying the land and the need to bring such a massive area of land under political and cultural control

- unspoiled nature and extreme landscapes -sublime in scale and presence and bereft of evidence of settlement -so this can be read as the starting point of the beginning process to gain control over nature

-Romanticism (or the Romantic Era or the "'Romantic Period"') was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated at the end of 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the growing impact of the Industrial Revolution -reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature

-Romanticism emphasized intuition, imagination, and feeling -European Romantic Movement reached America in the early 19th century and was aligned with the notion of the sublime --the sublime refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation

-concept of the sublime as an aesthetic quality in nature was first brought into prominence in 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) -Burke discusses that imagination is moved to awe and instilled with a degree of horror -sublime may inspire horror, but it also creates pleasure: dual emotional quality of fear and attraction

-Joseph Mallord William Turner (17751851) was an English Romantic landscape painter and regarded as a Romantic preface to Impressionism --work is characterised by a chromatic palette and broadly applied atmospheric washes of paint and notion of scale and destruction --natural catastrophes, and natural phenomena fascinated him

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-new emphasis on emotions as trepidation, horror, terror and awe are experienced by confronting the sublimity of untamed nature

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- William HenryJackson (1843-1942) involved in government expeditions and also instrumental in establishment of National Parks

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-Jackson presents American West as untouched, nearly empty, massive and unregulated -a landscape not only dealing with astonishment but also connoting pain and danger

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- The American Romanticism: commitment to individualism and the unfolding of the self, emphasis on intuitive perception and assumption that the natural world was inherently good and connected to God was pushed -The Romantic movement gave rise to Transcendentalism: belief in an ideal spirituality that "transcends" the physical and empirical and is realized only through the individual's intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established religions -Leaves of Grass (1888) Walter Whitman (1819 1892): everything emanates from God, his own soul, which is of the same essence, allows him to identify himself with every object in nature, person and God

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-landscape becomes a place where the viewer can find a symbolic state of mind connecting with the ideal presence of God -isolation particular in nature will deliver inner light and true insight

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- Edward Weston (1886-1958) seems to create images that master the idea of Transcendentalism

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- grand scale of nature given way to the attention of detail: to the minute and particular -image celebrates the small objects in the natural scene - the elements of natural scene are given a mystical presence as part of a larger transcendental unity of being

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- extreme American terrain of the desert transformed into something spiritual and mysterious - using the primary elements of sand and light in a way that fixes this moment in the unity of time and space

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- play of light, creation of pattern and texture - creation of contrast to create interest and metaphysical presence

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-makes elements of the natural distinct --the camera transforms the scene --image highlights Westons ever-present concern of a sense of unity and form -In an image like this detail is given to everything in the scene and every detail is given equal significance almost creating abstract images -This type of abstraction by Weston shouldnt however be considered as a kind of loss of reality, but as an extraction, a concentration, an abstract of common elements verging towards a universal valuing of form, and therefore of life and the spiritual, because according to Weston, lifes force and movement are embedded in form. By using the camera Ive shown how Nature offers simplified forms, already created and selected thus ready to use upon the artists instinct -.-so a democratic insistence on the importance of the merest detail so here again Weston is looking for an ideal image

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-Group f/64: artistic movement that gathered purist photographers basing their work on technical and stylistic perfection: any photos that werent perfectly focused or perfectly printed were considered impure. - style characterized by sharp-focused, carefully framed images precisely exposed images of natural forms and found objects -Group f/64 - * Ansel Adams * Imogen Cunningham * John Paul Edwards * Sonya Noskowiak * Henry Swift * Willard Van Dyke * Edward Weston

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-Ansel Adams strikingly detailed photographs of the American West seen as "pictorial testimonyof inspiration and redemptive power. - Adams developed the Zone System as a way to determine proper exposure and adjust the contrast of the final print. The resulting clarity and depth characterized his photographs and the work of those to whom he taught the system

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