Thursday, April 28, 2011

Images of Manifest Destiny

Vaningen Snyder
John Gast
After viewing the manifest destiny pictures in class the other day, I wanted to see what other images there were about this topic. Instead of finding more photos mainly from the “white” view, I found some that portrayed some of the Native American views. The photo below showed that the natives were simply pushing further west, but were really lost in the dark side of the painting. In the other image, the Native Americans are the focus of the picture, and the train is in the back off to the side. Instead of being seen as a glorified thing, the train does not seem to be nearly as important to the scene. The nature as well as the on looking people seems to be the major focus.
I don’t know enough to understand how the train is being portrayed, but it does not seem positive or negative to me. It seems as though the Native Americans are observing the train with concern, but they do not seem overly affected. The situation seems fairly neutral. It would be really interesting to see what paintings would look like drawn by the Native Americans.  

No comments:

Post a Comment