Gardiner Canyon, entrance to park before 1891

This black and white photograph of Gardiner Canyon was taken by Frank Jay Haynes. It depicts the entrance to a park, and likely refers to Yellowstone, where Haynes had been commissioned as an official photographer. This image can tell us a lot about the relationship between nature, art, and the formation of national identity in the United States. Haynes used the then-popular medium of photography to capture the sublime beauty of the American landscape. His images helped to promote the idea of the West as a pristine wilderness, ripe for exploration and tourism. This imagery was crucial to the establishment of Yellowstone as a national park, reinforcing a narrative of preservation but also shaping a specific vision of American identity tied to the land. To fully appreciate Haynes’s photograph, we might consult institutional records about the history of Yellowstone, the marketing campaigns that promoted it, and also the archives of indigenous groups impacted by the creation of the park.