Grand Canyon of the Colorado River

After years of struggling to capture the grandeur of the Western landscape, William Henry Jackson made this sublime view of the Grand Canyon. Dwarfed by the enormous rocky outcropping below, above, and behind him, a man--probably a surveyor--looks through a telescope to the other side of the canyon. Clearly conveying the awe-inspiring scale of the Western landscape by contrasting human and natural scale, this image belongs to a tradition of landscape and expedition photography meant to elicit a strong emotional response.