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UW Associate Professor to Give Sandeen Lecture Dec. 16

woman standing
Rachel Sailor

Rachel Sailor, an associate professor in the University of Wyoming’s Department of Visual Arts, will present the Sandeen Lecture in the Humanities Monday, Dec. 16.

Sailor will discuss “The Broad Movement: Pictorial Photography in the American West, 1900-1950.” Her talk will take place at 4 p.m. in Room 506 of Coe Library. A reception will follow. The lecture and reception are free and open to the public.

The Sandeen Lecture in the Humanities is named for Eric Sandeen, a former professor and chair of UW’s American Studies Program, and the founding director and director emeritus of the Wyoming Institute for Humanities Research (WIHR).

The lecture is co-sponsored by WIHR and the Wyoming Humanities Council.

Sailor will discuss her project that investigates the widely overlooked photographic style of pictorialism in the American West between 1900 and 1950.

“I argue that Western pictorialist photographs and photographers represent a regionalist impulse that is part and parcel of the larger cultural regionalism of the era, and that has its roots in the formidable photographic heritage of the 19th century American West,” Sailor says. 

Driven by a wealth of textual and visual primary sources, the project addresses the West’s relationship with the Eastern centers of art in the early century; the diversity of practitioners who made up Western photographic art production, such as women, Japanese Americans and Native Americans; and the style’s final demise as it related to the modernism of Group f.64, she says.

Group f.64 was a group of photographers -- including Ansel Adams and Edward Weston -- who focused on the sharp definition of the unmanipulated photographic image.

Sailor earned a B.A. from Oregon State University; an M.A. from the University of Oregon; and a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. She teaches 19th, 20th and 21st century American and European art history courses, but her area of research is photography of the American West.

Her first book, “Meaningful Places: Landscape Photographers in the Nineteenth-Century American West,” won the 2016 Barbara Sudler Award from History Colorado. She is working on a book manuscript concerning local photographic pictorialism in the American West.

For more information about the lecture, email Scott Henkel, WIHR director, at scott.henkel@uwyo.edu.

 

 

Contact Us

Institutional Communications
Bureau of Mines Building, Room 137
Laramie, WY 82071
Phone: (307) 766-2929
Email: cbaldwin@uwyo.edu


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