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Photographs of the Old West

Frederick Monsen's ethnographic photos of the American West

As a teenager, Monsen became fascinated with the new art form of his day, photography, and was soon accompanying land surveys as an informal tagalong, helping shoot the landscape and its inhabitants. Over the course of those decades, Monsen became deeply fascinated with the Native Americans of that region, eventually joining a group of other photographers (together known as the ‘Pasadena Eight’) in documenting their way of life before it was changed irrevocably. He captured his subjects, whether Navajo, Tigua, Apache, Hopi, Zuni, surveyors, prospectors, Mormons, missionaries, pioneers, or fortune seekers, with a degree of pathos that’s rare from that era of photography.

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