New West Book Review

Range Rover: “Evelyn Cameron: Montana’s Frontier Photographer”

By Jenny Shank, 1-11-08

Evelyn Cameron: Montana’s Frontier Photographer
By Kristi Hager
Farcountry Press
120 pages, $14.95

Evelyn Cameron was a remarkable photographer who lived in Montana from 1893 until her death in 1928, recording everything from weddings to roundups to Montana fauna, capturing a way of life that was soon to vanish, but her work was almost lost to time.  She had no children and made no plans for what was to happen to her photography after she died, so her negatives and prints lay piled in the basement of her friend Janet Williams for fifty years.  Kristi Hager writes in Evelyn Cameron: Montana’s Frontier Photographer about their eventual discovery:

“In 1978, Donna Lucey, a writer looking for material to illustrate a book on pioneer women, won Janet Williams’s trust, entered her basement, and discovered 1,800 negatives and more than 2,700 prints, as well as 35 diaries.  Donna Lucey used this astounding visual and written record to write the definitive biography of Evelyn Cameron.” Lucey’s book, Photographing Montana, 1894-1928: The Life and Work of Evelyn Cameron, covers Cameron’s story in detail, but this new Farcountry Press book, packed with photographs, serves as a fascinating, brief introduction to Cameron’s life and artistic achievements.

Evelyn Cameron was born into a wealthy family in England in 1868, but left that world of privilege and sidesaddle riding to make a scrappy life in eastern Montana with her husband when she was in her twenties.  The contrast could not have been more stark: while in England, Cameron had a flock of servants at her disposal (including one, Hager reports, assigned to brush Evelyn’s hair), in Montana she had to run a ranch almost single-handedly, as her husband, a naturalist, preferred to go out studying birds.  “She chopped wood, dug coal, tended a huge garden, raised chickens, milked the cow, branded, dehorned, and castrated cattle, broke colts, skinned and butchered animals both wild and domestic, cooked, baked, and scrubbed pots, pans, clothes, floors, and walls with no hired help and next to no help from her husband.”

That she managed to still maintain a rich artistic life while doing all this ranch work is astonishing.  The Camerons could barely support themselves on the earnings from their ranch near Terry, Montana, so Evelyn hired herself out as a photographer of weddings, confirmations, roundups, children, and families. 

As Hager points out in her captions throughout the book, Evelyn still managed to practice her photographic technique during these assignments, and took many pictures that are technically excellent, such of one of a little girl named Oral Hagen sitting next to her Collie in the prairie.  “The camera angle captures child and dog below the horizon,” Hager writes, “creating a more intimate setting in the wide, open prairie.” The wide-open, yet personal affect of this reminds me of Andrew Wyeth painting ”Christina’s World.” In both that painting and this photo, the viewer can practically hear the wind sweeping through the prairie grass.

When Cameron photographed her own subjects, she preferred to place people in the middle of the landscape and stand far back from them, giving an idea of the scale of the land and sky.  There’s one picture of a hardscrabble ranch that looks defenseless from the elements, and its occupants stand as tiny figures by a root cellar, proud and carefully dressed, in a way that suggests their bravery in making a go of it.

While she liked to photograph human subjects from a distance, Cameron managed to approach wildlife at close range, and Hager writes, “Cameron’s are among the first photographs ever taken of western North American birds in their natural habitat.” Cameron was working in a time before telephoto lenses, so she had to stake out birds all day, and was rewarded for her patience with photos of newborn eagles, a great blue heron in its nest, and two golden eagles perched side by side on a branch.

In contrast to some early Western photographers, who seemed to take pains to portray frontier life as being as difficult as it surely was, Cameron often brought her generous sense of humor out in her photos.  A self-portrait of her grinning, standing atop her horse, is featured on the cover of the book.  At one point she induced an accordionist to climb up in a tree for a portrait—and the musician looks leery of her idea.  There’s a toddler riding a hog, and a well-dressed lady feeding a pronghorn from a pan. 

Hager explains that it was common for frontier women to have a pronghorn for a pet, and in capturing this scene, Cameron’s eye may have benefited from the dislocation that came from having been born in England.  “She took particular pleasure in photographing scenes that were commonplace on the frontier but would surprise outsiders,” Hager writes.  Cameron captures a somewhat neglected side of frontier life—these people may have done backbreaking labor every day, but they also had fun, enjoyed their children and pets, socialized, and relaxed.

There are several photographs of Janet Williams, the woman who inherited the photos.  In one, Williams looks like a refined, demure lady: Her hair is swept up, she wears a formal dress with a high lace collar, and is seated at the piano that she brought with her from Minneapolis to Montana in 1907.  In all the others, Williams is outside getting dirty, helping Cameron rope a calf or posing with her pet coyote, her sitting-room finery traded in for a cowboy hat, her once fair skin browned.  These images suggest the wealth of possibilities that the frontier allowed women during this era.  A frontier life entailed a lot of difficult manual labor and little financial or physical security, but it could offer women an escape from the roles they were expected to fulfill in more populated parts of the country.  This, and a chance for endless adventure, must have been why Evelyn Cameron happily traded her cozy life in England for a challenging one in Montana. 

It’s impossible to come away from “Evelyn Cameron” Montana’s Frontier Photographer” without being charmed by the person at the center of it, a woman who lived so vibrantly that some of that energy is palpable still, eighty years after her death.

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