Paper Photography: Landscape/Cityscape

Outside the studio, Americans made landscape photographs for the purposes of both art and science, from the White Mountains of New England to the Yosemite Valley in California, and as far afield as Egypt, Greece and the Arctic.

Closer to home, from the very earliest paper photographs through the 1860s, photographers strove to capture familiar views of growing American cities, emphasizing significant commercial, civic and tourist locations.

At the forefront of the nation’s expansion west, photographers such as Timothy O’Sullivan and William Henry Jackson worked with official government survey projects to bring back images of the unexplored territories of the West.

Charles D. Fredricks, 1823-1894
Fredricks' Photographic Temple of Art, Broadway, New York, 1857
2005.27.291

Carleton E. Watkins, 1829-1916
View from Camp Grove, Yosemite, 1861
2005.27.245

Timothy H. O'Sullivan, 1840-1882
Ancient Ruins in the Cañon de Chelle, New Mexico Territory, 1873
2005.27.240

J. D. Edwards, 1831-1900
Steamships at Cotton Wharf, New Orleans, ca. 1857-1860
2005.27.209

William James Stillman, 1828-1901
Eastern Portico of the Parthenon, View Looking Northward and Showing Mount Parnes in the Extreme Distance, ca. 1869
2005.27.197