By the time Jennifer Emerling used to be 12, she were to 22 nationwide parks. In an interview together with her native newspaper that yr, the California center schooler stated that along with gathering shirts and filled animals from the parks, “I take a number of footage.” Requested what she would do when she’d exhausted the listing of parks to discuss with, Emerling responded, “Cross see them once more.”
Emerling, now a certified photographer, by no means stopped taking footage of nationwide parks. For her sequence “See The usa First!” she retraced her circle of relatives’s summer season highway journeys. The ensuing photographs put across a spirit of journey and childlike marvel. Emerling’s compositions juxtapose the ordinariness of smartphones and solar hats with the majesty of the herbal panorama. In a single photograph, guests pause at the Outdated Trustworthy boardwalk, in Yellowstone, to seize the geyser’s eruption; in some other, a lady holds a digicam, however her gaze is mounted at the view throughout a crystal lake in Grand Teton Nationwide Park.
For all their whimsy and nostalgia, the pictures additionally invite critical mirrored image at the complexities of American tourism and its fantasies of an unspoiled West. The sequence takes its name from an early-Twentieth-century advertising and marketing marketing campaign to advertise home trip a few of the rich by way of the railroads (the unique, longer slogan used to be “See Europe if you’re going to, however see The usa first”). “See The usa First!” will also be learn immediately, as meant via the railroad boosters—or with an ironic twist, throughout the hindsight of historical past. To recognize the various contradictions of our nationwide parks—spaces that have been touted as examples of “undisturbed advent” on the expense of Local American territorial sovereignty; puts that domesticate an appreciation of nature although they’ve lengthy been commercialized—isn’t to negate their good looks or energy.
This newsletter seems within the June 2024 print version with the headline “American Good looks.” While you purchase a guide the usage of a hyperlink in this web page, we obtain a fee. Thanks for supporting The Atlantic.