How the West was undone
Lewis & Clark Revisited: A Photographer’s Trail
Greg MacGregor
University of Washington Press, $29.95
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MacGregor deconstructs America’s fantasy West with understated, duotone photographs and spare text. Without bitterness or sermonizing, he retraces Lewis and Clark’s epic journey 200 years ago, challenging our nostalgia for an unchanging, golden yesterday by forcing us to confront the ugly and the ordinary in today’s “vernacular landscape.”
Juxtaposed with modern reality are excerpts from the diaries of Lewis and Clark. They describe a country teeming with life -- botanical, animal and human. Little of that remains today, fallen prey to expansionist dreams, buried in our relentless drive to make the West safe for “cows, corn and capital.”
It’s a trail of tears, and MacGregor’s lens faces it unflinchingly. Plastic buffalo morosely stand guard over an empty South Dakota highway. A horizon of desiccated sunflowers withers where prairie grasses once waved. Skies laced with high-tension wires soar over convenience stores. A pensive, haunting vision of what we have wrought.
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Susan Dworski