Primitive camera
Creators: name: Shannon, Heather A.
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2017

description: From 1895 to 1904, Pasadena bookstore owner Adam Clark Vroman (1856–1916) made eight summer trips to photograph the landscape and indigenous peoples of the Arizona and New Mexico Territories. In Southern California, his contemporaries recognized him as a local photographer of note and an authority on Southwest Indian cultural practices. Vroman consolidated his distinguished national reputation by forming working relationships with the staff of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology. The Bureau, established in 1879, was the key institutional proponent of social evolutionary theory in the United States. Adherents to the theory sought to map the development of the human mind as it evolved from the meanest state of savagery to middling barbarism and finally to fully realized civilization. The material cultures and social practices of the living indigenous peoples of North America were highly important to social evolutionary theory; they were cited as contemporary proof of the baser mental phases through which the civilized mind had long since evolved. Fully engaged with Smithsonian anthropology, Vroman endeavored to produce work relevant to the activities of the Smithsonian in the Southwest. These scientific aspirations fundamentally shaped his approach to picture-making, resulting in a body of work marked by directness, precision, and detachment—aesthetic qualities that scholars, underemphasizing the actual causes, have cited as evidence of artistic exceptionalism on Vroman’s part. This dissertation proposes a significant shift and correction in our view of Vroman and his work. It demonstrates that although certain aesthetic aspects of Vroman’s art may now appear to be exceptional and forward-looking, his photographic practice was in fact fully embedded in, motivated by, and reflective of contemporary anthropological discourses. Moreover, Vroman’s association with the Smithsonian casts new light on the photographic literature of the time: It reveals the great extent to which that literature—both technical and critical—adopted the language of social evolutionary theory in an effort to prove the medium’s rapid evolution from a savage to a civilized art. This has important ramifications for our understanding of Vroman’s photography and its early reception. In contemporary photographic circles, the characteristics for which Vroman’s photographs are now admired were then understood as the hallmarks of an amateur. The amateur photographer was held responsible for the field’s developmental stagnation and was denounced, in social evolutionary terms, as a savage. Vroman was keenly aware of such characterizations, and he agitated against them. His attempt to balance the demands of science against an implicit aesthetic repudiation accounts for the extraordinary complexity and ambivalence of his work.    The first chapter uses Vroman’s photographs of the Hopi Indian Snake Dance to demonstrate that social evolutionary theory informed contemporary efforts to trace the origins of photography. Chapter 2 explores Vroman’s first collaboration with the Smithsonian. The chapter underscores a set of ambiguities that, from the start, characterized his photographic project. Most central was his amateur status in two fields—photography and anthropology—that were quickly professionalizing. Chapter 3 expands on the uncertain future of Vroman’s photographic endeavors, addressing his status as a self-taught amateur operating outside the salon system. The chapter serves to demonstrate that, at the turn of the century, the amateur was held responsible for the field’s developmental stagnation and was rebuked, in social evolutionary terms, as a savage. Chapter 4 focuses on Vroman’s dogged pursuit of photographing desert clouds. As an avid reader of ethnologies of the Pueblo Indians, Vroman understood the significance of clouds to the Southwest’s indigenous peoples. Although in contemporary critical terms Vroman’s technique may have been decidedly primitive, his cloudscapes represent an unprecedented approach to landscape photography, one informed by Puebloan cosmology. The conclusion uses the insights gained from the case of Vroman to propose a new perspective on modernist photography in the United States. It considers whether post-World War I anthropology might be a useful theoretical tool with which to understand the development of modernist photographic discourses.