The American West is a region, perhaps more than any other in the United
States, that comes to us in visual terms. The grand landscapes, open
vistas, and magisterial views have made the act of looking a defining
feature of how we experience the West as an actual place. In Looking
West, John D. Dorst examines a largely neglected pattern of seeing that
stands in contrast to the universally familiar iconography.
When we engage in the act of looking, contends Dorst, we inevitably do
so according to historically determined patterns--discourses of seeing.
It is a central premise of Looking West that over roughly the last one
hundred years the American West, both as a physical location and as an
imagined place, has been an important laboratory for the production of
modern visual discourses.
Through a series of Western texts--folkloric, photographic, literary,
and historical--Dorst outlines another pattern of looking West, one
characterized by optical distortion, faulty vision, and the ambiguous
intersection of spectatorship, display, and covert observation. He
applies the insights gained from this analysis of discursive patterns to
various cultural displays located in the contemporary West. In a series
of ethnographic case studies--two folk art displays, a Western heritage
theme park, and Devils Tower National Monument--he shows how this other
discourse plays out at actual sites and institutions.
Dorst offers an account of visual practices that, though dressed in the
images and narratives of the American West, are in fact characteristic
of our modern consumer culture in general. This interdisciplinary
combination of discursive analysis with ethnographic observation and
material culture interpretation makes Looking West an original
contribution to the fields of visual culture studies, American studies,
and Western studies.
