ARTISTIC AND LIFE-LIKE

An independent historian of the Pacific Northwest presents a well-researched account of how photography developed alongside settlements that would become Washington state.

Well illustrated, delightfully told, and shrewdly cited, Greyhavens’ work is a masterpiece of local history. With a natural storytelling voice, the author takes readers through the delightful world of late 19th-century photography, interspersing dense explanations of photographic processes with colorful descriptions of the people who used them, beginning with the Prosch family, who began their association with the art as owners of a daguerreotype gallery in Newark, New Jersey; they would later come to own the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “a powerhouse of photojournalism throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.” The book is told chronologically, each chapter beginning with a concise timeline of the decades it covers to orient readers in the larger political landscape, as the book’s history takes readers through the period of the Civil War and beyond. The book is richly illustrated with archival photographs, their subjects meticulously traced in captions and corresponding text. Greyhavens doesn’t shy away from the the impact of European settlement on Indigenous peoples in the American West. As such, the author features photographs of many Indigenous subjects and explains how they were taken with an impressive level of detail, drawing on archival material. Indeed, Greyhavens’ rich, varied, and well-organized bibliography effectively reveals the thoroughness and high quality of his research. Overall, this is compelling survey of Washington state’s history with an emerging artistic and technological medium.

A punctilious Western photo history that focuses on a turbulent time of political and social change.