Customer Reviews

Photographing Montana 1894-1928: The Life and Work of Evelyn Cameron

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This work is a treasure. Evelyn Cameron and her husband, born into English society, established a ranch in eastern Montana early in the development of that part of the west. A need for additional income and a love of photography lead Evelyn to produce a large number of high quality photographs. Those photographs represent a historical archive of enormous value. The photos show the people of the time, how they made a living, and the tools that they used. My personal favorite is a photo Evelyn took of herself in her kitchen; she sent it to relatives in England to show them her life on the Montana frontier. It was a life of hardship, but also of achievement. The quality of Cameron's work is the equal of other great western photographers of the era, such as Jackson or Huffman, and it records a side of life not represented by anyone else. There is a balance in this book between text and reproduced photographs. It is a biography of Evelyn Cameron, including excerpts from her journals, as well as an exhibition of her photographs. A museum and gallery in Terry, Montana, is a repository of Evelyn Cameron's work and the total number of photographs is several times what this book is able to present. One hopes that other volumes of Cameron's photos will be published in the near future.

Evelyn Cameron left her English home to become a rancher in Montana in the late 1800s: she used her photography skills to help support her family, and captured Montana life in the process. Photographing Montana gathers photos which portray early Montana life and deserves a spot in any Montana history collection as well as in art libraries seeking examples of regional photographic talent. Excerpts from her diaries and letters include plenty of autobiographical insights.

Although she was born into British high society, Evelyn Cameron grew to love the desolation of Eastern Montana and photographed the beauty and emptyness of the landscape. Interesting reading about a tough, determined lady and her bookish husband, Ewen. Great photos of Eastern Montana and early homesteaders.

I live in the area of the photographer's subjects, and totally enjoyed the book and its' subject. The photographs, along with Evelyn Cameron's diary accounts of daily happenings, gave a captivating decription of what many of our homesteading ancestors endured. This is very enjoyable reading for anyone.

This is an outstanding book of frontier American photography, as well as an interesting story of the photography, Evelyn Cameron. Cameron was a high-society woman from England who moved to Montana with her husband in the late nineteenth century. Bored with frontier life, she learned photography from a neighbor and then began to photograph the natural beauty on wildlife of Montana. This books succeeds from both the frontier photography and the story of this woman's life.

This book, by Time-Life books editor Donna Lucey, has some very interesting photographs of Montana, taken about halfway between the Lewis and Clark expedition of two hundred years ago and today. Yes, the early 1900s were right in the middle of Evelyn Cameron's career.

Cameron, nee Flower, was one tough and talented lady. She moved to Montana with her husband Ewen, going there initially in 1889, on a hunting trip for their honeymoon. I found the stories and pictures of life in Montana fascinating. Much of the book deals with the growth of Terry, a town in the eastern part of the state, on the Yellowstone river.

At the time, the Kodak camera was the instrument of choice for most American photographers, however Cameron did much of her work with a 5x7 Graflex. There are dozens of her photos in this book.

Although Cameron died in 1928, Lucey was lucky enough to obtain many of Cameron's photos from one of Cameron's friends, Janet Williams, who was 95 years old by the time Lucey met her in August of 1979.

In 2002, PBS began shooting a documentary about Cameron, and it was released last year. It includes over 200 of Cameron's photos (over 100 of which are not in this book), and it won four regional Emmy awards. It was the first high-definition documentary for Montana PBS.

I recommend this book.

A coffee-table book that I actually read cover to cover. Filled with amazing photos from glass plate negs. Excerpts taken from thirty years of daily diaries. Best of all there wasn't much history of the area around Terry, MT until the glass plate negs and diaries were finally revealed by Donna Lucey after she convinced the heir of it all to show the world. A real treasure and one of my all-time favorite books. Evelyn Cameron was truly a frontier woman in every sense of the word.

This outstanding book combines both exceptional unusual photographs capturing the time and place, with profound explicit diary notes of everyday life in Montana in the early 1900's. The narrative text is well developed and presents an outstanding review of the frontier by a British lady who made her mark in eastern Montana.

This is a wonderful book. I have passed it around to many of my friends and family and they all love it! It is a diary of an extra ordinary women living in the frontier of Montana. Her daily life is unimaginable to us today. I am dismayed that I have been unable to order this for friends!! Please republish.

I liked the photographs in this book but was disappointed by the authors commentary as I found it quite negative overall. I thought that the general picture painted of Montana and the life of Evelyn Cameron was deliberatly bleak. I stopped reading several chapters in and just enjoyed flicking through the photographs.

An interesting collection of diary snippets and photos of early pioneer life.