In Eadweard Muybridge's photograph Wildcat Falls, Valley of the Yosemite (Figure 1.1), a waterfall rushes toward the foreground; the photographer must have been perched precariously on one of the well-worn rocks that frame the falls. two wooden footbridges, one seemingly stacked on top of the other, allow for a safe passage across and a thrilling look at the cascading water below. In Norway, photographer Knud Knudsen captured a nearly identical scene from a similarly low vantage point; the viewer peers up at a young man, leaning on a wooden bridge spanning the Slettefossen Waterfall in Romdalen (Figure 1.2).
The speed of the water was too great for Muybridge's and Knudsen's glass plates and camaras, so the falls appear as a vaporous, hazy blur, and ethereal absence at the center of each photograph. When Muybridge photographed Yosemeite with a mammoth plate camera in 1872, before he figured out how to stop movement in his better-known animal locomotion studies, a report by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead had already described this western landscape as a union of deepest sublimity with the deepest beauty of nature. Moreover, Olmstead patriotically boasted that visitors have already come from Europe expressly to see [Yosemite]. With analogous adulatory language, William Banks wrote about Romsdalen, the location of Knudsen's photograph, in his 1881 book titled, A Narrative of the Journey of the Argonauts. Banks strolled on afterwards to the Slaettefos, where the river Raume precipitates itself through a narrow gorge and forms one of the finest of the waterfalls of the second magnitude. In their promotion of these locations as spots for travelers from far away, Olmstead and Banks, like Muybridge and Knudsen, were all part of a burgeoning tourism industry. Yet, many of their readers (and viewers) may not have had the chance to encounter these rushing waterfalls and narrow gorges in person. The small bridges that Muybridge and Knudsen photographed occupy approximate positions in the center near a high horizon line. As manmade interventions in the landscape that make nearness to the falls possible, the bridges, like the photographers' own practices, provide a dramatic proximity to a remote spot. These photographs offer a new means of vicarious travel and exploration.

Egan, Shannon. Introduction: Views from Across the West and Toward the North. In Across the West and Toward the North: Norwegian and American Landscape Photography, edited by Shannon Egan and Marthe Tolnes Fjellestad, 1-68. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2022.

Shannon Egan is the Director of the Trout Gallery at Dickinson College.

For more information on the published version, visit The University of Utah Press's Website. https://uofupress.com/books/across-the-west-and-toward-the-north/

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