“Venturing Out on a Ledge to Get a Certain Picture”: The “authentic” spaces of Alvin Langdon Coburn's Grand Canyon

Abstract

The body of work produced during Alvin Langdon Coburn's journey to the Grand Canyon operates in two simultaneous but distinctive registers, yet the predominant critical investigation of his work has been limited to the handful of quite extraordinary pictures that evoke the precepts of Pictorial photography. If we are to come to terms with the larger undertaking, of which these pictures are an integral part, we need also to investigate the photographs from the journey that have not become iconic. These photographs reveal the “making of ” these icons of Pictorialism, depicting the conditions of their production. And what is most curious is that many of these photographs were made not by Coburn himself, but by his elderly mother Fannie, who accompanied him on these adventurous quests for an authentic American West. These two zones are distinguished not just spatially but conceptually, and the gendered binaries of adventure and safety, of independence and domesticity, and of authenticity and mediation, are brought into focus by the presence of Coburn's unlikely companion on his explorations. This essay draws upon a central concept in the theorization of the tourist, which holds that the fundamental striving of tourism — to find something “authentic” — is accommodated by structuring the world into fronts and backs, spaces where the “show” is performed, and those where the performers and their props remain provisionally concealed. Exploring Coburn's modulation of these two modes is fitting since he was, at the very moment of his journey to the Grand Canyon, being confronted with the social structures of tourism that made the original objective of his sojourn — to find something never before seen, something “authentic” — increasingly difficult.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Jessica May, Shirley Reece-Hughes, and Andrew Walker, of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, for their kind initial invitation to reconsider Coburn's work, and for their ongoing support for this project.

Notes

1 This text was first published, accompanied by McCutcheon's cartoons, in 1909. On the publication history of this slim but influential volume, see Weigle, “Canyon, Caverns, and Coordinates: From Nature Tourism to Nuclear Tourism in the Southwest.”