Mick Gidley – författare

This book is about the ways American and British writers, painters and photographers have represented the American environment. It brings together essays by American, British and European scholars which consider the one hundred and twenty years following the Revolution and examine the preconceptions, ideologies, rhetorical and aesthetic conventions that shaped attitudes to the North American continent. While ranging widely, the essayists focus on such figures as Jefferson, Crevecoeur, John Neal, James Fenimore Cooper, William Cullen Bryant, Thomas Cole, Samuel Morse, Fanny Kemble, Dickens, Hawthorne, Clarence King and Edward Curtis. Amongst the places featured in the discussions are the Niagara Falls, the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, Virginia's Natural Bridge, Mount Ktaadn and a Broadway omnibus. The book contains numerous illustrations, including early photographs of the western United States, and will be of interest to specialists and students of American literature, history and culture.

For three decades from the 1890s onwards, Edward S. Curtis took thousands of photographs of Native Americans all over the West. These were published (1907-1930) in twenty volumes of illustrated text and twenty portfolios of photographs; the project was supported by Theodore Roosevelt and funded in part by J. Pierpont Morgan, and spawned exhibitions, postcards, magazine articles, lecture series, a 'musicale', and the very first narrative documentary film. While not necessarily unique, the project was bigger, better funded, and more famous than any of its time, and its images still retain their influence today. Neither a eulogy to Curtis's achievement nor a debunking of it, this book is an honest study of the project as a collective whole: what it was, who was involved, and what it meant.

Mick Gidley provides an intimate and informative glimpse of photographer Edward S. Curtis (1868–1952) and his associates as they embarked on their epic quest to document through word and picture the traditional cultures of Native Americans in the western United States—cultures that Curtis believed were inevitably doomed. Curtis's project in the early decades of the twentieth century became the largest anthropological enterprise ever undertaken in this country, yielding the monumental work The North American Indian. Its publication was a watershed in the anthropological study of Native Americans, inspiring the first feature-length documentary film, popular magazine articles, books for young readers, lectures, and photography exhibitions. Housing a wealth of ethnographic information yet steeped in nostalgia and predicated on the assumption that Native Americans were a "vanishing race," Curtis's work has been both influential and controversial, and its vision of Native Americans must still be reckoned with today. Gidley draws on reports and reflections by Curtis and the project's assistants, memoirs by Curtis family members, and eyewitness accounts by newspaper reporters in presenting an unprecedented look at anthropological fieldwork as it was commonly practiced during this period. He also examines the views of Curtis and his contemporaries concerning their enterprise and how both Native Americans and the mainstream American public perceived their efforts.

The Shakers were a celibate, mystical and communitarian sect led by Mother Ann Lee of Manchester, which flourished in the United States from the 1770s to the end of the nineteenth century. Their cultural influence far exceeded their statistical presence in American society. Aspects of utopian thought and behaviour, religious belief, gender relations, design and attitudes to war were all affected by Shakerism.In this volume, leading American and British scholars from a range of disciplines identify the origins of the Shakers, indicate some of their characteristic ideas and practices, and outline affinities with other movements of the time and since. The collection both places the Shakers in their historical situation, and examines their continuing appeal.

The Grass Shall Grow is a succinct introduction to the work and world of Helen M. Post (1907–79), who took thousands of photographs of Native Americans. Although Post has been largely forgotten and even in her heyday never achieved the fame of her sister, Farm Security Administration photographer Marion Post Wolcott, Helen Post was a talented photographer who worked on Indian reservations throughout the West and captured images that are both striking and informative.Post produced the pictures for the novelist Oliver La Farge’s nonfiction book As Long As the Grass Shall Grow (1940), among other publications, and her output constitutes a powerful representation of Native American life at that time. Mick Gidley recounts Post’s career, from her coming of age in the turbulent 1930s to her training in Vienna and her work for the U.S. Indian Service, tracking the arc of her professional reputation. He treats her interactions with public figures, including La Farge and editor Edwin Rosskam, and describes her relationships with Native Americans, whether noted craftspeople such as the Sioux quilter Nellie Star Boy Menard, tribal leaders such as Crow superintendent Robert Yellowtail, or ordinary individuals like the people she photographed at work in the fields or laboring for federal projects, at school or in the hospital, cooking or dancing.The images reproduced here are analyzed both for their own sake and in order to understand their connection to broader national concerns, including the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act. The thoroughly researched and accessibly written text represents a serious reappraisal of a neglected artist.

From Ansel Adams to Carleton Watkins, Diane Arbus to Weegee, Richard Avedon to James VanDerZee, American photographers have recorded their vast, multicultural nation in images that, for more than a hundred years, have come to define the USA.In Photography and the USA, Mick Gidley explores not only the medium of photography and the efforts to capture key events and moments through photographs, but also the many ways in which the medium has played a formative role in American culture. Photography and the USA encompasses the major movements, figures and works that are crucial to understanding American photography, but also pays attention to more obscure aspects of photography’s history. Focusing on works that reveal many different facets of America, its landscapes and its people, Gidley explores the ambiguities of American history and culture. We encounter images that range from an anti-lynching demo in 1934 to Dorothea Lange’s poster All races serve the crops in California; an early photographic view of Niagara Falls against the painstaking detail of Edward Weston’s Pepper, No. 30; a fireman’s fight in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 to the Ground Zero images of 2001 by Joel Meyerowitz; an 1890s ‘Wanted’ image to Elliot Erwitt’s shot of the Nixon-Kruschchev ‘Kitchen Debate’. Organizing his narrative around the themes of history, technology, the document and the emblem, Mick Gidley not only presents a history of photography, but also reveals the complexities inherent in reading photographs themselves.A concise yet comprehensive overview of photography in the United States, this book is an excellent introduction to the subject for American Studies or visual arts students, or for anyone interested in US history or culture.

Representing Others examines a diverse range of cultural forms in which white novelists, sculptors, diarists, photographers, ethnographers, travel writers and filmmakers have depicted Native American, African, Pacific and Australian Aboriginal peoples. As they were seen by incoming whites who were themselves strangers to the land, they most often appeared incomprehensible, threatening, 'Other'.The analyses in this book go beyond simply asking questions about the 'accuracy' or otherwise of a work's representation of the culture under discussion. Although the seven authors conform to no single position and adopt a variety of critical approaches, they share a common concern. These essays all propose that if we are to use our own terms to speak of another culture, we must become aware of the problems involved in the act of representation itself.