American Self-Portrait

As photography flowered into a stable, usable and radical new medium in the mid-19th century, America literally took the medium into its heart. In many ways, they were meant for each other. America was a still-young nation, fascinated with itself and anxious to document its own adventure and its westward expansion. Photography would become an important tool in the American experience.

Such is the premise woven into the fascinating show now at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, “American Photographs: The First Century.” The show focuses on the various uses of photography to capture the Civil War, everyday life and natural splendors of the Southwest and Yosemite, what was then the frontier.

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Although a traveling show, culled from the Charles Isaacs Collection of American Photography and originating at the Smithsonian Institution, the exhibition continues a healthy tradition of photography curatorship in this museum. Like the large show of women’s photography last year, this selection piques our interest on other than just aesthetic levels, weaving in socio-historical aspects.

History is what you make of it, and some of the striking images here are less about grand, sweeping notions than about simple things, such as the not-quite candid, posed shot of “Two Workmen Polishing a Stove,” ca. 1865, or a shot of San Francisco streets in 1857, pre-internal combustion engine and pre-earthquake. Even given the crudity of the technology, with long exposures and fragile resolution, photography takes us back in a way that previous modes of representation could not.

That wasn’t always a benevolent thing. Just as the Vietnam War was the first to be beamed into America’s living room via television, the Civil War was the first to be documented by photography. Cameras, though, were aimed less at the carnage or the human toll than the physical ravages on the landscape in the wake of battle, as in “Wilderness Battlefield” and “Ruins of Gaines.” The evidence of destruction here, to eyes accustomed to the explicit norm of modern imagery, is almost genteel.

When the human toll is shown, it is with a cool, clinical eye. William Bell’s shots of war victims were taken on commission, for medicine’s sake: A Gen. Barnum shows off a small crater-like wound in his abdomen, and another soldier, looking stoic and proud, has a swollen stump where his leg used to be.

Photographers in the early days were pioneers and mercenaries, both dealing with a new medium and looking for work, wherever it might lead. Take the English-born Bell, who went from shooting battered bodies to the great outdoors, where he photographed the rugged Western landscape. It was a mission laden with irony, in that photographers were documenting a new world and bringing back field reports to the government. The latter were to show what lay “out there,” what could be exploited. The images helped spell doom for unspoiled beauty.

That didn’t happen in Yosemite, which exerted a hypnotic charm over photographers, as it still does. Early photographs of this landmark no doubt helped ensure its protection as a treasure worth keeping pure.

In this show, Yosemite is shown from varied sources. There is an 1872 shot from early motion-picture experimenter Eadweard Muybridge, as well as a 1935 shot by Ansel Adams, who would take American landscape photography to a new plateau of expressiveness.

There was a frontier beyond Yosemite, of course, and Carlton Watkins’ 1865 shot of Mirror Lake, in all its pristine stillness, documents a natural wonder no longer in existence--though for natural reasons: It dried up.

Niagara Falls was another site with built-in appeal for photographers. It still is, of course, but by now, national natural wonders have been photographed so extensively that they have been pushed into the realm of kitsch, the stuff of tourist snapshots. In the mid-19th century, however, the cliches were still in the process of becoming.

Other images in this exhibition retell the American story, with a kind of proud heroism. We sense that we’re looking at near-mythic moments in viewing a gleaming locomotive, a mill consuming a hillside and the German photographer John K. Hiller’s 1872 image of a Hopi Mesa, an image touching on the tragedy of Native American life.

Native American life again is seen in the mannered studio portraits by Frank A. Rinehart, as if his subjects were museum pieces, relics in the making. As they were.

There are other telling portraits here, as well. Lewis Hines’ probing, artful “Little Orphan Annie in a Pittsburgh Institution,” a 1904 shot of a displaced and dirty-faced girl with a tough and disarming gaze, hums with compassion rather than sentimental hokum. Nine decades later, you are there.

“Rafting Party,” an anonymous shot from 1910, conveys agrarian repose. Its men tote a banjo, a ukulele and a fishing rod, and look lazy with a purpose.

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Photography’s natural slide into advertising is viewed in such images as “Delivery Vehicles and Staff of the Fame Laundry Co.,” from 1915. Meanwhile, giddy postcard lore shows an early face in “Riding a Giant Corncob to Market,” from 1908.

The exhibition also shows hints at the art photography to come, such as a darkly impressionistic self-portrait by Imogen Cunningham. But that’s another story. This fascinating exhibition deals with photography and its tight relationship with a young nation eager to see itself and to watch its own evolution, its own manifest destiny.

While people of all nationalities are interested in photography and American history, it would seem that this show would be particularly appealing to Americans. In these images, we see ourselves, in all our glory, youth and naked ambition.

* “American Photographs: The First Century,” through Jan. 31 at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State St., Santa Barbara. Hours: Tuesday-Thursday and Saturday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Friday, 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Sunday, noon-5 p.m.; 963-4364.