Time
Friday, March 1, 2019
10:45am–11:15am
Location
Memorial Union, Arizona Ballroom (Room 221)
301 E Orange St, Tempe, AZ 85281
Presenter
Presentation Abstract
At the Grand Canyon, the axiom “a picture is worth a thousand words” does not hold true very often. Long known as one of the most challenging landscapes to capture photographically, the Canyon tends to shatter visual reproduction, the very thing at which photography purports to excel. This presentation focuses on a lesser-known character in the history of the region, a photographer named Henry G. Peabody, who beginning in the late 1890s began making slideshows of the Grand Canyon in an explicit attempt to make photographs speak volumes about the landscape. He did this by jettisoning the notion that any single picture could do the Grand Canyon justice, and instead worked for decades to piece together dozens of scenes into a single viewing experience to audiences throughout North America. Mapping out the precise locations, called “station points,” from which Peabody took each of his 42 photographs gives us clues as to the kind of photographer—and the kind of geographical thinker—that he was. In a digital, monograph-like project called "Enchanting the Desert," my research team and I have done this analysis of Peabody’s Grand Canyon slideshow to make geographical sense of a historical document through which Peabody was trying to express the Grand Canyon as a whole. I come to this conclusion about Peabody’s motivation because of the way his slideshow accreted and incorporated new pictures with each subsequent trip through the first three decades of the twentieth century.