Bighorn Visions: The Photography of Jessamine Spear Johnson by Tempe Javitz (review)

Reviewed by: Bighorn Visions: The Photography of Jessamine Spear Johnson by Tempe Javitz Michaela Rife Bighorn Visions: The Photography of Jessamine Spear Johnson Tempe Javitz South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2023. $29.95 cloth. Tempe Javitz introduces her grandmother Jessamine Spear Johnson's photographs through her own personal memories of Johnson's art, where it hung on the ranch house walls among the better-known works of [End Page 81] male, western artists Frederic Remington and Charlie Russell. Bighorn Visions argues that Johnson's photography should also stand alongside her contemporaries in the history of photography. The most striking comparison is New York photographer Marion Post Wolcott, one of a few women to work for the famed Farm Security Administration photography project. In the late summer of 1941, Wolcott visited Wyoming and Montana to photograph the region and many of the same subjects that Johnson captured throughout her long life in the Bighorns (a Wolcott photograph is reproduced on p. 30). The comparison to Wolcott illuminates the most promising aspect of Johnson's largely unknown oeuvre—more than simply standing alongside other early twentieth-century photographers, her lens offers a distinctly local, intimate view that an outside photographer can never capture. As Bighorn Visions demonstrates, Jessamine Spear Johnson's life (1886–1978) spans a period of immense change in the West. With her camera in hand, Johnson witnessed the rise of the personal automobile, the Great Depression, the growth of dude ranching, changing reservation policy, two world wars, and the anniversary commemorations of nineteenth-century battles. She also experienced dramatic changes in photographic technology. While the contemporaneous Farm Security Administration aimed to document a tumultuous decade across the nation, Johnson's work offers a window into one region, her own, over several decades. Her photographs are personal in a way that photojournalists can rarely achieve; her subjects were family, friends, neighbors, ranch workers, and visitors to her family's dude ranch. The intimate perspective of a talented photographer is the promise of Bighorn Visions, which itself is a personal project for Javitz. As such, the book will appeal to multiple audiences including Western history enthusiasts, photography fans, scholars, and, especially, today's Big-horn residents. Bighorn Visions is a short but readable book; an opening essay by historian Mary Murphy paired with shorter essays and captions by Javitz offer sufficient information to understand the basic structure and context of Johnson's life. After Murphy's introduction, the remainder of the book is divided into four thematic chapters [End Page 82] with pages of captioned photographs: Johnson's technical development as a photographer, changes in ranch life including the rise of dude ranches, interactions with the neighboring Crow and Northern Cheyenne Reservations, and the "natural wonders" of nearby Yellowstone. Interested readers will undoubtedly find compelling threads that invite further contemplation or research. For example, the Spear and Johnson families' involvement in reintroducing bison to the Crow Reservation was particularly gripping. In the mid-1930s, Robert Yellowtail, Crow Agency superintendent, negotiated donations of bison from Yellowstone and the National Bison Range, with transportation facilitated by nearby ranches. Three of Johnson's photographs documenting the transfer are reproduced, revealing her eye for history and how she experimented artistically. The first chapter adeptly explains her embrace of new photographic technology. A photograph in a cattle chute demonstrates her use of the new Eastman Rapid-Rectilinear lens to capture straight lines, but her angle and the cow's almost wry gaze at the camera speaks to Johnson's distinct artistic eye. Further evidence of Johnson's experimentation is spread [End Page 83] throughout the pages of Bighorn Visions, from unexpected angles and silhouettes to double exposure and even abstraction. Readers who find themselves enthralled by Johnson's archive will hope, like this reviewer, that Bighorn Visions is only the beginning of increased attention on her work.