Colonial Landscapes, Ecology, and Indigenous Cosmologies
This project examines how US landscape photographs of the nineteenth and early twentieth century in the Rijksmuseum’s collection contributed to the westward expansion and the pacification of the ‘Wild West’.
ABOUT THE PROJECT
Incorporating ecocriticism and Native American and Indigenous Studies, this analysis will focus on photographs of Indigenous sites that became national parks or settlements for Euro-American populations. This project will have three components: an analysis of the visual strategies employed by photographers and their relation to 19th-century ecological thought in the USA; an examination of the relationship between landscape and portraiture in the work of the American photographers represented in the Rijksmuseum’s collection; and a reading of the images informed by Indigenous cosmologies and the human relationship with the natural world.
AIM OF THE PROJECT
This research will result in an academic article that can be submitted for consideration to journals of art history or environmental studies. At a time when photography continues to promote environmentalism amid the systematic denial of climate change, this project will explore landscape photography’s trajectory, intertwined as it is with the history of ecological thought and settler colonialism in the United States.
RESEARCHER
María Beatriz H. Carrión
Terra Fellow in American Photography
PARTNERS AND SPONSORS
This fellowship is made available thanks to the Terra Foundation for American Art, and is part of the Rijksmuseum Fellowship Programme.