She arrived in Montana as a 21-year-old bride in 1889. She had gone there with her husband to hunt, but they fell in love with the place and stayed on. In 1894, Evelyn bought a camera–the newest toy of the middle class–and became passionate about it. And handy with it. The pictures she took of eastern Montana between 1894 and her death in 1928 comprise one of the most gorgeous records of the eccentricities of frontier life ever seen. Weddings, funerals, sheep shearings, bronco bustings, towns that looked like jokes about towns, eerie badlands, cowpokes, ranch owners, schoolteachers, merchants; English gentry playing cowboy and all manner of wildlife on the hoof and on the wing–she went after everything around her.
She sold most of her work for as little as 25 cents a picture and seems not to have cared one way or another about fame or recognition. After she died, the photographs sat in a friend’s cellar for half a century before they were rediscovered.
In Photographing Montana, 1894-1928 (260 pages. Knopf $60), Donna Lucey, the writer who recovered Cameron’s work, draws heavily on Cameron’s diaries and photographs to draw a double portrait of an exceptional woman and a landscape unimaginably wild and lonesome looking. Turn-of-the-century Montana was all horizon. It swallowed up herds of cattle and sheep, scores of immigrants, towns, ranches, sodbuster huts and still looked empty. In Cameron’s photographs, even the animals look like they could use a friend.
Nervy, smart, independent and funny in an almost crackpot way, Cameron fit right in with this loony way of life. In her diary she records without so much as an exclamation mark a hunting trip with her husband where it was 20 below beside the stove in their tent, and she saw nothing unusual about riding 26 miles on horseback, carrying “folding tripod, camera & 12 plates, 18 mounted prints, and 1 … [photo] album” in order to spend several days photographing a sheep-shearing camp. She was habitually droll. Corresponding with a customer, she wrote, “I have been doubly unfortunate, having broken one of my ribs & also your negative–the last an irreparable fracture.”
Cameron photographed her subjects with abiding and egalitarian respect. Men, women and children of all economic and ethnic backgrounds stand on an equal footing before her camera. She was particularly apt at capturing the nutty dignity of these people, and she caught a lot that other photographers missed. Dexterity and know-how in particular won her heart. The pictures of her friends the Buckley sisters, who ran a ranch near hers, give off an almost giddy sense of their prowess. For all her self-effacing documentarian instincts, she was an artist in spite of herself. Time and again the visual poetry of line and shadow confound the chaos of frontier life without erasing a scrap of its rough jingle-jangle. This wonderful book rescues an astonishing photographer from oblivion.
