If this photo looks like an awesome adventure in progress, you?re right. Also, there were bears. And it was all in the interest of an art exhibit you can see now in Los Angeles.
Back in the mid-19th century, Hudson River School landscape painters such as Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Cole expanded their geographic range, moving out from their eponymous valley in upstate New York and heading into the untamed west. These adventures were not simply meant to provide the artists with new subject matter. They were part of a religious, political, environmental, and colonial enterprise aimed at achieving the young nation?s expansive notion of Manifest Destiny, which involved both ?settling? the region and preserving some of its most spectacular scenery. Some art historians have described the resultant paintings?breathtakingly grand images of tiny white men dwarfed by majestic landscapes, tromping ever westward, guided by divine streaks of golden light?as ?advertisements for westward expansion.? With the advent of photography in the decades after, shooters like Carleton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge echoed similar practices with this emergent technology, both as documentation of the region and as a prototypical form of fine art. But while a painter could just traipse in to someplace like the Yosemite Valley with a sketchbook and make small studies that could then be expanded in the studio, a pioneering photographer back then needed quite a bit more equipment.
?All these early photog...