Imagining wilderness, constructing landscapes: The value of vision in the American West and tropics, 1821--1914

In nineteenth century America, wilderness was a constructive fiction and an imposing material fact, and it was intimately connected with emergent technologies of image production. The development of photography and other methods of reproducing standardized images significantly altered the ways wild spaces were understood, valued and used. Framed, repeatable images of idealized landscapes like the Yosemite Valley taken by Eadward Muybridge and Carleton Watkins helped value them as sublime, iconic spaces of escape and regeneration removed from an increasingly urbanized and industrialized world. Technologies of mechanical reproduction and wilderness heroes such as John Muir widely distributed images like these, and this created the possibility of preservation by turning the landscape into an aesthetic commodity valuing the perfect view. At the same time, photographs of the arid West by Timothy O'Sullivan and other photographers of the geological surveys were mapping wild spaces as sites of utility and potential productivity since they lacked aesthetic value. As these images were circulating different ways of valuing the wild, the mythologized frontier of the West was reaching its geographical limits. The heroes of wilderness conquest, among them Buffalo Bill and Theodore Roosevelt, were becoming visual icons in their own right. Their images conferred narrative value on the sites of their exploits that occasionally allowed for conservation as places to reenact the national myth.;While the frontier extended in North America, image-making technologies and the impetus of development shifted south into the American tropics. Instead of offering pieces of sublimity, images of the tropics showed a chaotic landscape in need of transformation and utilitarian development, and many of the heroes of Western preservation ventured into the jungle with new and different visions. At the same time that pieces of landscape in the American West were being saved for their cultural and aesthetic value, the wilderness of Central and South America was emerging as a new frontier of commodity extraction and movement, including the construction of the Panama Canal. An emphasis on visual pleasure as a primary value of wilderness allowed pieces of the wild to be set aside from development, but it more often justified global environmental conquest in support of a national epic of domination. The circulation of icons of wilderness, both as landscapes and heroes, constructed the spaces of the Americas.