At the same time that Gilpins interest in landscape work distinguished her from most other women photographers, her approach to landscape photography set her apart from men photographers who, like Gilpin, documented the western United States. Western American landscape photography grew out of a male tradition, pioneered by photographers attached to government and commercial survey teams that went west in the 1860s and 1870s. These explorer-photographers documented the West that their employers wanted to see: an exotic and majestic land shaped by awesome natural forces, unpopulated and ready for American settlement. The next generation of male photographers, represented by Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter, often worked with conservationist groups rather than government agencies or commercial companies, but they nonetheless preserved the heroic style and maintained the role of respectful outsider peering in with reverence at a fragile natural world.
For Gilpin, by contrast, the landscape was neither an empty vista awaiting human settlement nor a jewel-like scene resisting human intrusion, but a peopled landscape with a rich history and tradition of its own, an environment that shaped and molded the lives of its inhabitants. Her photographs of the Rio Grande, for example, consistently depict the river in terms of its significance to human culture: as a source of irrigation water, a source of food for livestock, and a provider of town sites. Also instructive is Gilpins general avoidance of extreme close-ups of her natural subjects: for her, emblematic details could never suggest the intricacies of the interrelationship between people and nature that made the landscape a compelling subject. While it is dangerous to draw conclusions about a feminine way of seeing from the work of one woman, it can nonetheless be argued that Gilpins unique approach to landscape photography was analogous to the work of many women writers who, far more than their male counterparts, described the landscape in terms of its potential to sustain human life.
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