“Across the West and Toward the North examines how Norwegian and American photographers pictured the landscape in a period of earthshaking technological transformation and expanding infrastructure. Shared artistic strategies are revealed through this smart cross-cultural study, which challenges entrenched notions that nationalism was uniquely expressed and understood in the landscape photography of each country. This book anticipates growing transnational scholarship resulting from the bicentennial commemoration of Norwegian immigration to North America in 2025.”
—Leslie Ann Anderson, Director of Collections, Exhibitions, and Programs, National Nordic Museum
“This international collaboration reveals fascinating parallels among nineteenth-century American and Scandinavian landscape photographers whose shared motifs—sublime geological phenomena, ethnographic and landscape tourism, wayfarers, railroads, bridges, roads, and inhabited landscapes—affirm communal, transnational connections. Such images featuring environmental exploration and exploitation, underscoring the delicate balance of nature and culture, have lasting relevance.”
—Theresa Leininger-Miller, professor, Art History, University of Cincinnati
“Egan and Fjellestad's edited volume is a timely contribution to the history of photography that examines the shared, transnational impulses in white, predominantly male, Norwegian and U.S. photographic landscape representations and practices in a period of intrusive and often violent transformation of existing social-natural environments in both geographies.”
—Ingeborg Høvik, associate professor of art history, The Arctic University of Norway