When the Austrian photo reporter Ernst Haas emigrated to New York from the black and white Vienna of war returnees in 1950, his heart opened. But his true homeland was the American West and color photography. What he was looking for on his first trip to New Mexico was the old wild west. He still found the last foothills: at the Grand Canyon, in Monument Valley and in the overwhelming landscapes in between. But more and more often, progress disrupted the pre-civilizational archaic that so fascinated Haas, most blatantly in this picture of Route 66 in Albuquerque.
A little later, many of his somewhat younger colleagues, who were already socialized with pop culture, enthusiastically captured the new world of motels, fast-food joints, muscle cars and their uprooted drivers on Kodachrome. Haas was also attracted to the colorful plastic. But the idealized landscape shots were just as important to him. This ambivalence is what makes the illustrated book “The American West” so appealing. Buffalo and mobile homes, trucks and wild horses can be seen there side by side.
Ernst Haas: The American West. Prestel Verlag, Munich 2022. 208 pages, 50 euros.
(Photo: Prestel (SZ))
The longer Haas traveled the West with his camera, the more often history and myth eventually became one: in the impressive pictures he took of indigenous Americans, for example. Partly on the reservations, partly as a set photographer for the western “Little Big Man” with Dustin Hoffmann and Faye Dunaway. His “Indians” are actors! He went even further with his photos of the dramatic horseback rides, campfires and mustang hunts of the “Marlboro Man”, with which Haas spent years and until his death in 1986 commissioned by Philipp Morris to create imaginative but enormously effective and beautiful images of the Wild West in set the world.