The Sublime
"Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is a product of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. I say the strongest emotion, because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure. [...] When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are, delightful, as we every day experience." (Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry , Part 1, Section VII).
"The passion caused by the great and the sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that, far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings, hurries us on by an irresistible force. Astonishment, as I have said, is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree; the inferior effects are admiration, reverence, and respect." (Burke , Part 2, Section I).
"Greatness of dimension is a powerful cause of the sublime." (Burke, Part 2, Section III).
"Another source of the sublime is infinity [...]. Infinity has a tendency to fill the mind with that sort of delightful horror, which is the most genuine effect and truest test of the sublime. There are scarce any things which can become the objects of our senses, that are really and in their own nature infinite. But the eye not being able to perceive the bounds of many things, they seem to be infinite, and they produce the same effects as if they were really so." (Burke, Part 2, Section VIII).
"[S]ublime
objects are vast in their dimensions, beautiful ones comparatively small:
beauty should be smooth and polished; the great, rugged and negligent;
beauty should shun the right line, yet deviate from it insensibly; the
great in many cases loves the right line, and when it deviates it often
makes a strong deviation: beauty should not be obscure; the great ought
to be dark and gloomy: beauty should be light and delicate; the great ought
to be solid, and even massive. They are indeed ideas of a very different
nature, one being founded on pain, the other on pleasure; and however they
may vary afterwards from the direct nature of their causes, yet these causes
keep an eternal distinction between them, a distinction never to be forgotten
by any whose business it is to affect the passions." (Burke, Part 3, Section
XXVII).
"The sublime, by converting powerlessness
and a lurking sense of social self-diminishment -- or historical guilt
-- into a conviction of dematerialized power awaiting national use, eventuated
in a figure of 'self-reliance,' then, for whom power is not the capacity
to act or to conjoin, but to convert such inaction or disjunction into
tropes and compacts founded in vast scenes of dehistoricized willing. Flooded
with energy and light, artistic aggression was sublimated into a national
performance." (Rob Wilson, The American Sublime: The Genealogy of a Poetic
Genre [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993], p. 5).
Further Reading
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756) Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1763) Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836) Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854) Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995)
Surveying the West
With the conclusion of the Civil War, the Federal government, wanting to demystify the West, made investigating, mapping and understanding the Western territories an integral part of its domestic policy. Washington wanted to know whether the land could be farmed, what its natural resources were and how easily it could be settled. It was with this in mind that, from 1867 to 1879, the government sponsored what came to be known as the four "Great Surveys." Each of these were grand undertakings both in terms of the amount of territory they examined and in the wealth of information contributed to the knowledge of the American West. By the early 1870's four distinct groups were being sponsored by Congress: Survey of the Fortieth Parallel led by Clarence King Survey West of the One Hundredth Meridian led by George Wheeler Survey of the Territories led by Ferdinand Vanderveer Hayden Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region led by John Wesley Powell
The
inefficiency of running four groups was remedied in 1879 with the establishment
of the United States Geological Survey.
The images made by the photographers employed during the surveys and by the commercial railroad and mining companies saw a convergence of the political, economic, and aesthetic values evident in the notions of Manifest Destiny, the Frontier, and the Sublime.
Photographs were used as:
illustrations of the scientific theories and findings of the surveyors images to sell the West to entrepreneurs and, after the transcontinental railroad's completion, tourists back East evidence of the environmental virtue of the West in order to lobby for government protection evidence of the grandeur and uniqueness of the American nation
Links
Gallery of the Open Frontier
The Illustrating Traveler: Adventure and Illustration in North America and the Carribbean, 1760-1895
Crossing the Frontier: Photographs of the Developing West, 1849 to the Present
Photographs of the American West, 1861-1912
Westweb: The Mechanical Eye: Western Photographic Resources Click icon in right hand frame of Westweb Homepage