Customer Reviews

Print the Legend: Photography and the American West

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Heroic cowboys and savage Indians. Homes on the cozy range. Gold for the taking in them thar hills. Print the Legend shows how the first photos of the American West were cropped and captioned to embellish the stories and myths that drew the pioneers westward. Few historians write this gracefully, and Sandweiss's prize-winning scholarship is free from pedantic distractions. The engrossing section on photography and the American Indian is worth the price of this handsome. deliciously intelligent book.

--Michael More, Albuquerque Journal

"Print the Legend" is an insightful study of the co-development of photography and the image of the American west. Sandweiss begins by discussing the limited uses of daguerrotypes as intermediaries for other forms of visual information in the context of the Mexican-American war and the unfolding western landscape. She goes on to show that as the technology of wet-plate photography developed, so did the direct use of supposedly objective photographs in building the mythology of the western United States. The chapter on photography and representations of American Indians was particularly strong and nuanced.

"Print the Legend" is recommended for anyone with an interest in early photography or western American history. But above all, I found it to be a deep examination of photography and photographic representation.