Edward Buscombe. Inventing Monument Valley.

Buscombe, Buscombe. Inventing Monument Valley. Nineteenth-Century Landscape Photography and the Western Film.

In: Petro, Patrice (ed). Fugitive Images: From Photography To Video. Indiana University Press. 1995. pp 87 - 108.

In the 1870s and afterward, large numbers of photographs were commissioned by the railroad companies. The railroads had a direct influence in the development of tourism, and the more the western landscape could be promoted as an unspoilt wilderness, the more business they did. even if paradoxically the more tourists arrived the less unspoilt it became. The railroads needed to both portray to its fullest extent the wildness of the country, thereby elevating their own achievements in traversing it, and at the same time demonstrate that while the landscapes had lost nothing of its splendor, it has now been rendered safe and comfortable for travel. They therefore lavishly commissioned photographs which showed off their spectacular achievements in throwing railways across the West's most intractable terrain. (p98)