Compares how photographers in Norway and the US represented the environment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when once-remote wildernesses were first surveyed, developed, and photographed. Making images while traversing almost inaccessible terrain, photographers created a visual language that came to symbolize each nation.

List of PlatesList of FiguresForeword by Marthe Tolnes FjellestadAcknowledgments1. Introduction: Views from Across the West and Toward the North—Shannon Egan2. Ragged Places and Rugged Men: Photography, the American West, and Masculine Mettle—James R. Swensen3. Traveling with Knud Knudsen: Roads and Railways in Norwegian Photography—Torild Gjesvik4. Getting Soaked at Yellowstone: Photography and the Making of the Tourist Landscape—Elizabeth Hutchinson5. Nature and Photography: Anders Beer Wilse’s Photographic Equivalents—Trond Erik Bjorli6. Views Across Continents: Ten Photographs—Marthe Tolnes Fjellestad7. Dwelling in the Photographic Landscape—Elizabeth Hutchinson8. Lieutenant von Hahnke’s Ill-Fated Bicycle Trip—Marthe Tolnes Fjellestad9. On a Summer Snowbank: A View toward the Glacier—Shannon Egan10. Carl Abraham Pihl and Andrew J. Russell: Railway Landscapes—Torild Gjesvik11. Landscapes with More than Mountains: Give and Take—James R. SwensenPhotographers’ Biographies by—Shannon Egan and Marthe Tolnes FjellestadSelect BibliographyList of ContributorsIndex

Across the West and Toward the North examines how Norwegian and American photographers pictured the landscape in a period of earthshaking technological transformation and expanding infrastructure. Shared artistic strategies are revealed through this smart cross-cultural study, which challenges entrenched notions that nationalism was uniquely expressed and understood in the landscape photography of each country. This book anticipates growing transna­tional scholarship resulting from the bicentennial commemoration of Norwegian immigration to North America in 2025." - Leslie Ann Anderson, Director of Collections, Exhibitions, and Programs, National Nordic Museum"This international collaboration reveals fascinating parallels among nineteenth-century American and Scandinavian landscape photographers whose shared motifs—sublime geological phenomena, ethnographic and landscape tourism, wayfarers, railroads, bridges, roads, and inhabited landscapes—affirm communal, transnational connections. Such images featuring environmental exploration and exploitation, underscoring the delicate balance of nature and culture, have lasting relevance." - Theresa Leininger-Miller, professor, Art History, University of Cincinnati