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Mining Sight: The Gendered and Racialized Vision of Extractive Photography in the Work of Carleton Watkins and His Patrons /

紀錄類型:	書目-電子資源 : Monograph/item
正題名/作者:	Mining Sight: The Gendered and Racialized Vision of Extractive Photography in the Work of Carleton Watkins and His Patrons // Natalie M Fleming.
作者:	Fleming, Natalie M.,
面頁冊數:	1 electronic resource (321 pages)
附註:	Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 85-12, Section: B.
Contained By:	Dissertations Abstracts International85-12B.
標題:	American studies. -
電子資源:	https://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=31298975
ISBN:	9798382837338

Mining Sight: The Gendered and Racialized Vision of Extractive Photography in the Work of Carleton Watkins and His Patrons /
Fleming, Natalie M.,

Mining Sight: The Gendered and Racialized Vision of Extractive Photography in the Work of Carleton Watkins and His Patrons /Natalie M Fleming. - 1 electronic resource (321 pages)

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 85-12, Section: B.

The nineteenth-century California-based photographer Carleton Watkins took thousands of photographs during his career, but only one known self-portrait. It was unusual, not only to his oeuvre but because he represented himself as an old-fashioned placer miner, complete with the appropriate tools for extracting value from the land. This dissertation analyzes Watkins' self-presentation as a purposeful visual statement connecting his work, and western landscape photography in general, with the figure of the mythic gold rush miner, narrowly imagined by the general public as male, white, and independent. Using a close reading methodology for analyzing diverse primary source materials, including Watkins' rarely-studied portrait photographs, as well as his mining commissions and canonical Yosemite images, I describe the physical and discursive similarities between miner and photographer that enabled Watkins to fashion his camera as an extractive tool and his profession as representative of a particular American ideal emphasizing self-reliance, whiteness, and masculinity. Watkins' authority with his wide audience came not only through his reputation as an authentic western type, but also through his relationship with California's flourishing mining industry, which hired him to create the first photograph that was used as evidence in an American courtroom for the 1858 case, U.S. v. Fossat. As a new technology, photography had not yet been established in the minds of Americans as a trusted medium for truth. When the judge in this case, with the full authority of the United States' justice system, accepted Watkins' image as worthy of his domain, he offered powerful assurance that Watkins' photography was a vision of unmediated reality superior to witness testimony, Mexican disenos, and U.S. survey maps.As Watkins' racialized and gendered images earned evidentiary status, so-called experts on American land began incorporating his photographs to support their own ideas in the debates embroiling their burgeoning fields concerning men's proper relationship to religion, nature, and each other. Among these experts, geologist Josiah Dwight Whitney, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, and naturalist Louis Agassiz were introduced to Watkins by others within their shared insular community of opinionmakers and through the mining industry, which financially influenced their efforts to assert their vision about topics that would have been out of bounds for them by our contemporary standards. Their veneer of scientific neutrality gave cover to conclusions justifying their own superiority as representatives of idealized white masculinity. They chose particular photographs to assert a sense of control over feminized subjects, both people and land. This work led to the justification of the continued violent erasure and mistreatment of Black, Chinese, indigenous, and Mexican populations throughout the United States and the privileging of a relationship with the environment premised on maintaining the visual qualities of specific sites over other experiences that could be had there. Watkins and his patrons left their mark on the nation, most visibly in their names ascribed to the landmarks they helped delineate on California's maps while erasing the indigenous naming systems already in place. From Mount Watkins in Yosemite, I follow a map of the Sierra Nevada to interrogate the ideologies represented by the towering heights of Mount Whitney, the breathtaking views from Olmsted Point, and the unyielding Agassiz Column, enabled in part by Watkins' troubling-limited mining sight.

English

ISBN: 9798382837338Subjects--Topical Terms:

2122720
American studies.
Subjects--Index Terms:

Watkins, Carleton

Mining Sight: The Gendered and Racialized Vision of Extractive Photography in the Work of Carleton Watkins and His Patrons /
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