Evelyn Cameron
Montana's Frontier Photographer
photography by Evelyn Cameron
text by Kristi Hager
published by Farcountry Press
- Born in 1868 to a wealthy British family, Evelyn Cameron traded privilege for adventure, the lush English countryside for the austere eastern Montana badlands, a lavish estate for a tiny homestead shack.
In 1894, at the age of 26, Evelyn turned to the burgeoning art of glass-plate photography as a way to support the Camerons' struggling horse ranch, producing some of the most remarkable images of pioneer life ever seen.
Often riding twenty to thirty miles roundtrip, carrying her nine-pound camera around her waist and her wooden tripod in a gun scabbard, she spent thirty-four years documenting eastern Montana. She captured western landscapes: the ruggedly beautiful badlands, vast expanses of unfenced prairie, and otherwordly sandstone formations. And she photographed western characters: sodbusters, cowpunchers, and sheep shearers, stern-faced ranch families, and hopeful, dreamy-eyed immigrants. She also produced some of the first photographs of North American birds.
Evelyn Cameron: Montana's Frontier Photographer showcases 117 of the finest and most fascinating images by this adventurer, homesteader, ranchwoman, and great American photographer.
120 pages, 9 1/8'' x 8 1/8'', 118 b/w photos
softcover
ISBN 10: 1560374659
ISBN 13: 9781560374657
$16.95
RELEASE DATE
March 2007
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Evelyn Cameron's Montana Postcards from the Montana Historical Society
| Evelyn Cameron
Montana's Frontier Photographer |
| "Ranch women commonly had pronghorns for pets. While other photographers might ignore this scene, Cameron found the incongruity of Netty and her pronghorn to be exactly the reason to capture the image, taken in 1908. She took particular pleasure in photographing scenes that were commonplace on the frontier but would surprise outsiders."
-from page 42 "Unusual lighting from both left and right gives Ewan a ghostly visage in this 1914 portrait. He died of cancer eleven months after this photograph was taken. His magnificent trumpeter swan specimen levitates on the white-draped chair, a tribute to Ewan's dedicated study of a bird that was disappearing from Montana."
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Kristi Hager has lectured on Evelyn Cameron throughout Montana as part of the Montana Committee for the Humanities Speakers Bureau program. Hager lives in Missoula, Montana, and has worked as a self-employed painter and photographer in the state since 1984. She is sole proprietor of Light Room, an architectural and fine art photography business. Her photographs and paintings are in the permanent collection of the Yellowstone Art Museum in Billings, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis in Helena, the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas, the Missoula Art Museum, and the Capital One collection. |
Honor Book, Montana Book Awards, 2007