Snow and Timber Line, Medicine Bow Mountain
1868/69
Medium
Albumen print, pl. VII from the album "Sun Pictures of Rocky Mountain Scenery" (1870)
Dimensions
Image/paper: 15.5 × 20.4 cm (6 1/8 × 8 1/16 in.); Album page: 23.1 × 30.3 cm (9 1/8 × 11 15/16 in.)
Classification
photograph
Department
Photography and Media
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
236161
Art Historical Context
In the late 1860s, as the transcontinental railroad forged its way across the American West, photographer Andrew Joseph Russell captured the untamed beauty of the Rockies for the Union Pacific Railroad.Snow and Timber Line, Bow Mountain* (1868/69), an albumen print from his 1870 album *Sun Pictures of Mountain Scenery*, depicts the stark boundary where snow-capped peaks meet forested slopes in Wyoming's Medicine Bow range. Russell, a Civil War veteran turned documentarian, used his camera to celebrate both engineering triumphs and natural grandeur, helping to mythologize the frontier for Easte...
About the Artist
Andrew Joseph Russell · 1830–1902
Andrew Joseph Russell (1829–1902) was a pioneering American photographer whose work captured the raw drama of the Civil War and the monumental engineering of the transcontinental railroad. Born on March 20, 1829, in Walpole, New Hampshire, to Joseph Russell and Harriet Robinson, he grew up in Nunda, New York, where he developed an early passion for painting, creating portraits, landscapes, and eve...