Photographer of the Southwest [antikvár]

ADAM CLARK VROMAN by beaumont newhall dam clark vroman railroad man, book collector, bookseller, amateur archaeologist, and photographer, linked two great periods of Western photography. He was one of a small number of amateurs who continued the tradition of field photography begun in the i86o's by Timothy H. O'Sullivan, J. K. Hillers, and William Henry Jackson. And he anticipated the direct, precise, and sensitive styles of such twentieth-century photographers as Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. His best work was done between 1895 and 1904 in Southern California, Arizona, and New Mexico—the area defined as the Southwest by his friend, Charles Fletcher Lummis, the New Englander who walked 3075 miles across the continent in 143 days to become city editor of the Los Angeles Times. Like Lummis, who was also an amateur photographer, Vroman's purpose was the documentation of the land, the Indians who lived on it, and the relics of the Spanish Colonial period. Others shared this purpose: George Wharton James, a writer, and Edward S. Curtis of Seattle who took as his lifetime dedication the photographic documentation of all the Indians in the United States. This generation of field photographers faced problems which their predecessors had not known. The West was no longer wild. Tourists swarmed through the land, encouraged to travel by railroads, hotels, and Chambers of Commerce. Photography was no longer limited to those willing to master the difficult wet-plate process and to pack dark tents and processing equipment along with bulky tripod cameras and heavy glass plates. The invention of dry plates and roll film reduced photography to the pressing of a button. The Kodak, the Kamaret, the Photoret, the BuII's-Eye, the Hitor-missit, the R D. Q. ("Photography Done Quickly"), the Quad, the Alvista,