Barbed Wire

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The term “barbed wire” has several connotations: impediment to a charging infantry in wartime, the fringe along the top of prison walls, or simply the taut strand marking boundaries and the end of the freedom know to an unfenced world. But the photograph on the dust jacket of the book Barbed Wire: Poetry and Photographs of the West with its leaning posts, its tangled strands of barbed wire, and the clutter of what appears to be baling wire around what might have been corner posts or gateposts suggest desolation. Whatever use the fence originally had, it has lost.

This picture, like most of the others in the book, has the paradoxical quality of leading gently with harsh materials. There is a kind of poignancy about the broken fences, the machines left to rust away, and the iron fences around the graves in the neglected cemetery. For the most part, the pictures are impressions rather than illustrations. The effect produced by the book results from the combining of the two arts. The two reinforce each other. The effect is not earthshaking, but gains strength from the fact that both poetry and pictures are close to the earth.

Two collections of historic photographs

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Each of these pictorial books was apparently published to books take advantage of a ready-made 1993 Mormon audience. The publication of A Window to the Past coincided with the Church curriculum emphasis on Church history and the Doctrine and Covenants. Set in Stone, Fixed in Glass capitalized on the interest and market created by the centennial anniversary of the dedication of the Salt Lake Temple. Both books reflect ambitious research, the culling of many and diverse collections, and the bringing together of photos, objects, and informative items, many of which have never before been readily accessible to the average reader. However, these books do not work equally well.

It is generally unfair for a reviewer to review the book she or he wanted written, rather than the book which exists. However, when the author and the publisher themselves lead prospective readers to believe a book is other than it turns out to be, comparing the appearance with the reality may be a service to an unsuspecting public. Such is the case with Set in Stone, Fixed in Glass: The Great Mormon Temple and Its Photographers.The title, cover photograph, design, and author’s introduction all set expectations, summarized in the first paragraph of the inside cover flap: “To celebrate the centennial of the [Salt Lake Temple] dedication, Nelson Wadsworth has assembled nearly 400 rare turn-of-the-century glass, copper, and dry-plate exposures which place the temple in historical and aesthetic perspective.”

Trilogy of photographic essays

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Abraham clearly points out that his family’s literal and spiritual exodus from Haran to Canaan was fraught with larger meaning: “Therefore, eternity was our covering and our rock and our salvation, as we journeyed from Haran…to the land of Canaan” (Abr. 2:16). As everyone from Moses to Lehi and from Brigham Young to Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell has pointed out, something about the journey motif resonates in the human soul and suggests particular and universal meanings for us all. We are, after all, a bunch of pilgrims, strangers, and wanderers–and the journey motif replicates not only our individual and collective treks through mortality as, with E.T., we cry out and long for “home”; it traces, as well, our individual journeyings unto Christ, our learning to sing “Babylon, Babylon, we bid thee farewell.”

Perhaps that is why this remarkable trilogy (or triptych) of photographic essays by Maurine Jensen Proctor and Scot Facer Proctor depicting three remarkable journeys has so moved this reviewer, who is usually content to leave Pero table books casually admired and generally undisturbed. In fact, I have been aesthetically and spiritually moved, and I believe most Latter-day Saint readers will likewise be moved by these felicitous combinations of truth and beauty, instruction and delight.

The City of Joseph in Focus

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Careful documentation and publication of Nauvoo photographs will enhance Latter-day Saint historical scholarship by permitting researchers and authors to use these materials accurately as primary sources for studies of old Mormon Nauvoo.

Just over one hundred and fifty years ago, in September 1839, the first American photographers made the earliest images on metal plates called daguerreotypes. Within a short time of its introduction in the United States, the daguerreotype was brought to Nauvoo by Lucian Foster, a New York convert to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He set up his daguerrean gallery at the corner of Parley and Hyde streets and produced the first photographic images of Nauvoo and its citizens (1844–46). His work began a process that eventually created thousands of photographic views of Nauvoo. Only a few of Foster’s views exist today, among them the famous “Temple on the Hill,” sometimes known as the “Temple over the Outhouse.”

Besides Foster, other photographers to capture the city include Thomas Easterly, a St. Louis photographer (1846–47); B. H. Roberts, Church leader and historian (1885); F. Goulty, a local photographer and businessman (1890–1900); James Ricalton, a professional photographer from the firm of Underwood & Underwood (1904); George Edward Anderson, a Utah portrait and landscape photographer (1907); and Harold Allen, an architectural photographer at the Chicago Art Institute (1940–60). The early views of Nauvoo produced by these photographers, along with many other photographs housed in private and public repositories throughout the United States, make up part of the documentary sources upon which modern historical research and publication are based.

The History of the Mormons in Photographs and Text

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Tobler and Wadsworth’s The History of the Mormons in Photographs and Texts: 1830 to the Present is certainly the most important collection of historic Mormon photographs available to date. Although published in 1989, the sesquicentennial of the invention of photography, the book is essentially a translation of their 1987 volume, Der Weg zum Licht. We were pleased to see an English version of this book.

Wadsworth provided the majority of the photographs for History of the Mormons from his twenty years of research. Historians have only recently come to share Wadsworth’s vision that photographs are historical “documents” that help illuminate the past. “My philosophy,” Wadsworth writes, “has been to get them preserved and protected before someone decides to throw them away” (8). His preservation of these treasures has been invaluable.

Sanpete Scenes

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Both Peterson and Bennion are competent geographers, and their book, though aimed at a wide audience, reflects solid scholarship in its treatment of the elements of place. The goal, however, is breadth rather than depth. The book is made up of seven chapters divided into forty-four topical subchapters, most of which are only one or two pages long.