Eastern landscape photographs have been largely eclipsed by images of spectacular Western sites. (Perhaps the popularity of Ansel Adams’s pictures helped establish a taste for the similar spirit of the early Western photographs.) “East of the Mississippi: Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Photography” at the National Gallery of Art here is the first comprehensive museum show to turn a light on this era of Eastern landscape photographs. Eastern landscape images, sometimes beautiful, sometimes grand, spurred tourism and development. Most wartime photographs were not quite so explicitly artistic as Easterly’s; late in the century, photographers insisted more ardently that they were artists.

Source: New York Times July 06, 2017 18:45 UTC