Picturing the West: Masterworks of 19th-Century Landscape Photography

October 22, 2016 - January 15, 2017 - The 41 photographs in this exhibition can be viewed as documentation, as art, and as promotion. The photographers presented America’s natural splendor in a way that was accepted as scientific and factual, but they also constructed a vision of the West as a land ripe for development, exploitation, tourism and, in some cases, preservation. Several of the photographs record major features of America’s first national parks; the exhibition, in fact, commemorates the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service.