Pictorial Photography and the American West, 1900-1950

This book is an investigation of the widely overlooked photographic style of pictorialism in the American West between 1900 and 1950 and argues that western pictorialist photographers were regionalists that had their roots in the formidable photographic heritage of the nineteenth-century West. Driven by a wealth of textual and visual primary sources, the book addresses the West’s relationship with the eastern centers of art in the early century, the diversity of practitioners such as women, Japanese Americans, Indigenous Americans, western rural workers, etc., and the style’s final demise as it related to the modernism of Group F.64. Couched in the rhetoric of regionalism; it is a refreshing and innovative approach to an overlooked wealth of American cultural production.