Stephen Shore, U.S. 97, South of Klamath Falls, Oregon. July 21, 1973

When you hear of an exhibition featuring the work of Ansel Adams, you may think of the decor of your dentist’s waiting room. But while “Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West,” which opened yesterday at the MoMA, includes the usual contributions from iconic American picture-makers ranging from Robert Frank to Ed Ruscha, the exhibition goes beyond Western clichés of epic landscapes. Rather than simply paying pictorial homage to the mountainous, rugged vision of the West, “Into the Sunset” depicts the construction of the myth of the West through the evolution of photography as a medium. You won’t look at heroic portraits the same way again: Andrew J. Russell’s photograph of the transcontinental railway’s completion portrays only white workers, though ninety percent of the laborers were Chinese. The artifice of Edward Sheriff Curtis’ images of Native Americans is similarly exposed. Looping the loop, “Into the West” includes a Cindy Sherman untitled film still in which she wears thick braids and dark red plaid, and a work by An-My Lê, another of the few 21st century pieces in the exhibition, resembles the early black-and-white photography of the western frontier. Curator Eva Respini took time to talk to VMAN about the exhibition.

Simon Castets: Even the imagery of California’s hookers, hippies, and beatniks participates in a narrative of marginality associated with that part of America, ever since Richard Avedon’s book In the American West. Did you come across works that successfully attempted to escape myth-making?
Eva Respini: I think ultimately all of the works in some way participate in contributing to the mythology of the West, whether that myth is the West as paradise, or Eden as seen in the nineteenth century photographs by Carleton Waktins, or Ansel Adam’s version of the modern sublime in the twentieth century, or as the end point for failed dreams seen in Dorothea Lange’s 1936 Migrant Mother or Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s pictures of the male hustlers he paid to photograph in Hollywood. The images in “Into the Sunset” do not all picture the West from the same point of view, or even, perhaps, picture the same West. Rather, each is one part in a continually shifting and evolving composite image of a region that has itself been growing and changing since the opening of the frontier. Their incredible variety illustrates the fascination the West has had for photographers since the invention of the medium, and how large this region looms in the popular imagination.

Of the more than 150 photographs in the exhibition, only six were created after 2000. Is it a deliberate way to highlight the historical progression of the West’s image as a long self-fulfilling prophecy? Are there periods that are not addressed in the exhibition?
The exhibition includes works from the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and it is more or less equally distributed. The exhibition pretty much covers the history of the medium. The earliest pictures date from the 1850s, a few short years after the advent of photography, to the most recent work, executed in 2008. The bulk of the work in the exhibition was made in the twentieth century, when settlement of the land, the open road, and suburban development were ripe subjects for many photographers. I think contemporary interest in the West is manifested in images that speak to the complexity of the West’s promise, and the psychology of failed dreams, such as Katy Grannan’s pictures of individuals seeking reinvention.

If you would have to think of a similar exhibition concept based on another region of the world, which one would you think could be as lush, mythology-wise?
This exhibition is about the parallel relationship between photography and the West, which I think is a unique one. The American West’s mythology is very powerful, and extends beyond photography to film, literature, and other disciplines. I think regions such as China and Japan have an allure for many artists, filmmakers, architects, and writers, but such a show about those areas would not be possible just through the lens of photography.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #43. 1979

Timothy O’Sullivan, Ancient Ruins in the Canyon de Chelle. 1873; David Levinthal, Untitled, from the series The Wild West. 1989

KEYWORDS: America, art, MoMA, photography

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