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Landscapes For The People: George Alexander Grant, First Chief Photographer Of The National Park Service

Author : Ren Davis
Published : 2015-09-01

The authors of this beautiful book open their preface with an anecdote about working in the National Park Service photographic collection with archivist Tom Durant and encountering marvelous black-and-white photographs of many national park units. Who is the photographer, they asked, and learned he was George Grant, first chief photographer for the Park Service. I had exactly the same experience at the collection in the 1990s and am delighted to discover this book that highlights Grant’s work. He is one of the many little-known people who contributed to the flourishing of the NPS and the National Park System in its early decades.

The beauty of Grant’s work is reflected in this book, which is one quarter text and three-quarters high-quality black-and-white photographs. Everything about this 254-page book, from title page to index, is of very high production quality. The aim of the authors is to reveal Grant as one of America’s premier landscape photographers among the likes of Carleton Watkins, William Henry Jackson, and Ansel Adams, all of whom are important to national park history. Grant’s work is less known than these photographic luminaries because he worked for the National Park Service and most of his photos were credited to the agency rather than to him. Grant seems to have been content to labor in relative obscurity, but Ren and Helen Davis have now rightfully lifted him from that with this book.

Grant served as NPS staff photographer from 1929 to 1954, during the period when the agency established its viability and expanded dramatically. His work served various agendas, such as promotion, documentation, and graphic illustration of national park ideals of beauty, enrichment, education, and preservation of America’s natural and cultural legacies. He loved the travel required for his job, logging 140,000 miles in visiting more than 100 parks (a photo of a road map on which he recorded all his car travels across the U.S. is included), and he produced more than 30,000 images. They appeared in exhibits, brochures, books, and magazines, always credited to the NPS rather than to him. For decades, his photographs presented the national parks to the American people. Today, some of his images serve a purpose he might never have imagined – comparing national park landscapes of the early-to-mid-20th century with photos of today to document differences from climate change and other causes.

A long essay, titled “A Life Behind the Lens,” tells the story of Grant’s early life, how he came to be the NPS’s first official photographer, and touches on the highlights of his career with the agency. The authors clearly wanted the book to be mostly about Grant’s photography, and it is, so the telling of his photographic career is very condensed and strictly chronological. Key players in national park history enter his story: Horace Albright, who brought him on board; Ansel Hall, chief naturalist, who advocated for photography as a tool of the NPS Educational Division; Harold Bryant, who expanded the role of photography in the agency’s educational efforts. Small photos of Grant and other players in his story, and by Grant of “The Hearse” that he drove around and in which he worked, among other tools, are scattered judiciously through the essay. It is a good summary of Grant’s NPS career and what his itinerant life was like.

The next 167 pages are devoted to 169 of “George Grant’s Photographs.” This section is divided into three parts: “Landscapes,” including photos of parks, monuments, and historic sites; “People and the Parks,” images of people enjoying national parks shot from 1922 to 1948; and “Portraits, Special Assignments, and Technical Images.” This last section features photos Grant took of such NPS figures as Horace Albright, William Henry Jackson, Frank Pinkley of Southwest national monument fame, Isabelle Story, CCC enrollees, portraits of Blackfoot elders at dedication of the Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park, and a fossil at Scotts Bluff Museum. The diverse nature of Grant’s assignments is certainly evident in these and other images.

Landscapes for the People is a must-read and addition to the library for anyone interested in the history of our national parks. It is a photographic history of national parks in the era from the 1920s to the 1950s. The images are wonderful. The authors suggest that Grant’s photos are not up to the technical and artistic standards of Ansel Adams. They say Adams was the artist, Grant the craftsman. This may be so, but they go on to say: While Adams' dramatic landscapes appeared beyond the skills of the average photographer, Grant’s images of landscapes and people may have been viewed as more approachable and reproducible by park visitors armed with their own Kodak Brownies or other consumer-level cameras.

If so, then Grant’s photographs may have been akin to a bridge, linking family snapshots with fine art. This is an interesting thesis. I doubt many park visitors with their Brownies thought they could equal the wonderful work of Grant, or aspired to, but he undoubtedly helped them appreciate what they were seeing and motivated them to try to capture some of the beauty and interest of it for documentation of their personal experience of America’s national parks.

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