Light in the West

When photography was in its infancy, the American West was still a frontier. For a period of almost fifty years, photography and the frontier developed and interacted in complex ways: photography became an instrument in the opening up of the West, while the frontier lent impetus to the growing popularity of the young art. Dramatic western subjects first became feasible as photographs with the invention of the wet glass plate process in the 1850s. this enabled photographers to abandon the portrait studio and take their cumbersome cameras into the wilderness. Western explorers could now use photographs in place of artist’s sketches to record their discoveries. It was primarily through such photographs of discovery that the Western frontier became known to the eastern United States and Europe.Light in the West rediscovers the western wonders of 19th century America through the eyes and the sepia-toned prints of a few venture-some men who became this country’s first wilderness photographers. It also witnesses the birth of journalistic photography during the Civil War; the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad; the displacement of the Native Americans; the growth of San Francisco from Gold Rush town to urban center; the use of photography as an aid to scientific exploration; the new art’s role in the encouragement of tourism and emigration; and its development form a simple recording device into a groping form of self-expression.On a filmic level, Light in the West attempts something more than documentation. It tries to express—by its very style—the energy and ambition that conquered the American West. More an “experience” than a conventional documentary, this film’s many narratives and simultaneous actions seek to suggest the sweep—and the ironies—of history. Here the camera and lens are cast not just as instruments of discovery, but as symbols of technology and empire: the camera is more that a tool—it is a weapon. Here the American Indians are not just people deprived of their lands; they are also metaphors for the land itself, and for an ancient way of life threatened with extinction. And here glass—whose ring dominates much of the soundtrack—is more that the means of registering an image: it is the essence of a way of seeing—and changing—the existing world.