Multnomah Falls, Oregon 1867

Carleton Watkins made this albumen silver print, "Multnomah Falls, Oregon," during a time of rapid westward expansion in America. He captured the sublime beauty of the American landscape, but it’s important to remember that this ‘untouched’ wilderness was already home to many Indigenous peoples who were being displaced. Watkins’s photographs, while undeniably beautiful, were also tools of colonization. They presented an image of the West as a resource to be exploited, a blank slate for settlement. The lack of human presence in many of his photographs further perpetuated the myth of an empty, unclaimed land, ready for the taking. Look at the scale of the falls, the tiny body of water. These images encouraged settlement, but they also erase the history and presence of Native communities. It's a complicated legacy, one of artistic achievement intertwined with social and political implications.