Abstract
This paper is based on the archival photographs in the Emery Kolb Collection housed in Special Collections and Archives at Northern Arizona University. In 1902, Emery Kolb and his brother Ellsworth established a photo studio on the south rim of Grand Canyon. Every morning, wrangler guides would stop their mule teams carrying tourists near the Kolb Photo Studio and Emery would make a photograph with the tourists sitting on their mules, about to descend into the canyon. He did this nearly every day until his death. When the tourists returned from the canyon, he would sell them the photographs he made that morning. Specifically, this paper is based on my research of the “Kolb Trail Photos,” a collection of over 40,000 images of Grand Canyon tourists who rode mule trains into the Grand Canyon between 1904 and the early 1970s. These photographs, made daily for over 60 years by Kolb, are framed nearly identically. Taken together, the images comprise a visual record of visitors to the Grand Canyon and provide insight into the developing tourist culture that began to grow rapidly after 1901 when the Santa Fe Railway opened a rail spur from Williams, Arizona to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. This study provides an analysis of the photographs for what they reveal about the visual culture and tourist structures of vision at Grand Canyon in Arizona. In addition, I address the problems and possibilities of incorporating these largely similar photographic images into a documentary film.
Presenters
Mark NeumannProfessor and Program Coordinator for Creative Media and Film Program, ]School of Communication, Northern Arizona University, Arizona, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Archival Images, Photographs, Visual Culture, Documentary Practices, Grand Canyon, Tourism
