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 |
| "Missoula photographer and artist Kristi Hager clearly feels a kinship with Evelyn Cameron, the British gentlewoman-turned homesteader, whose vivid photographs capture frontier life at the turn of the last century.
According to Hager, who wrote the text to accompany a new collection of Cameron's black-and-white images, her work 'stands out from other frontier photography because of its unique mixture of directness, structure, theater, and humor.' Cameron's amusing portrait of herself, standing atop her horse, Jim, embodies all of those elements, while also portraying a woman who is clearly enjoying the independent life she has chosen for herself. The 117 photographs in this collection were gleaned from the collection of the Montana Historical Society and offer a mesmerizing sliver of life in eastern Montana 100 years ago. The intrepid photographer, with her nine-pound Graflex camera tied to her waist, often rode 20 or 30 miles roundtrip to photograph the hardscrabble lives of homesteaders, ranchers, and sheepherders. Solemn children, dreamy immigrants, durable farm wives, and stubborn sodbusters stand undiminished against a vast canvas of prairie and sky." -Kristi Niemeyer, Montana State of the Arts
"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." -Jenny Shank, New West magazine |
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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