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Copublished with the Utah State Historical Society. Affiliated with the Utah Division of State History, Utah Department of Heritage & Arts Andrew J. Russell is primarily known as the man who photographed the famous “East and West Shaking Hands” image of the Golden Spike ceremony on May 10, 1869. He also took nearly one thousand other images that document almost every aspect of the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad. Across the Continent is the most detailed study to date of the life and work of an often-overlooked but prolific artist who contributed immensely not only to documentation of the railroad but also to the nation’s visualization of the American West and, earlier, the Civil War. The central focus in the book is on the large body of work Russell produced primarily to satisfy the needs of the Union Pacific. Daniel Davis posits that this set of Russell’s photos is best understood not through one or a handful of individual images, but as a photographic archive. Taken as a whole, that archive shows that Russell intended for viewers never to forget who built the Union Pacific. His images celebrate working people—masons working on bridge foundations, freighters and their wagons, surveyors with their transits, engine crews posed on their engines, as well as tracklayers, laborers, cooks, machinists, carpenters, graders, teamsters, and clerks pushing paper. Russell contributed to a golden age of Western photography that visually introduced the American West to the nation, changing its public image from that of a Great American Desert to a place of apparently unlimited economic potential.

Frederic Remington (1861-1909) was one of the last American artists to offer his contemporaries a vision of the American Old West, that wild terrain with its immense prairies, herds of bison, and the last American Indians. A painter, but above all a popular illustrator of his time, Remington skilfully captivated the public's attention by presenting a realistic view of this visceral way of life on the brink of submitting to invading civilisation. Authentically capturing its roughness, force, and also its colours, Remington quickly became the representative of American painting in the eyes of the world. Aiming his focus at the attitudes of his characters and animals, Remington’s photographic style lent an added realism to his subjects. A sculptor as well as a painter, Remington also knew how to sculpturally express the ardour of these strong men and wild animals battling with the evolution of a new continent. The bucking bronco, still recognised today as his signature subject, magnificently illustrates the power of freedom emanating from these masterpieces.

Discusses trends in contemporary American photography, with particular reference to three recent exhibitions. The first, curated by Sandra Phillips, entitled Crossing the Frontier: Photographs of the Developing West, 1849 to the Present at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, traces the role of photography in the creation of the mythology of the Western frontier and included the work of Lee Friedlander, an Easterner who has taken as his subject for the last decade the inhospitable Sonora desert of the Southwest and the notion of home. The second, Perpetual Mirage: Photographic Narratives of the Desert West at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, addressed questions raised by Rosalind Krauss and others regarding the status of early photographers of the American West that were produced as part of a colonial agenda but which are now presented as art. The third, the travelling retrospective Crimes and Splendors: the Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach, includes work by Misrach recording the use and misuse of the American Western landscape by its European settlers in metaphorical terms. The author also considers briefly recent landscape works by Sally Mann.