Coming Home: Rose Marie Cromwell’s reflection on the American West

All images from A Geographical Survey © Rose Marie Cromwell.

Travelling to off-grid locations with her mother and daughter, Cromwell returns to the place where she grew up, creating a body of work that reflects both a political and personal reunion  

The American West, with its vast stretches of plains, mountains and deserts, was the last area of the United States to be developed. The mass migration, rooted in Manifest Destiny – a cultural belief in the 19th century that Americans had a duty to expand the dominion – imprinted the tenets of freedom, growth and greatness into the public imagination. While rapid industrialisation irrevocably changed the landscape, the notion of cowboys – armed, heroic and operating just outside the law – created an ideological staging ground for the archetype of American masculinity and a wider cultural identity that remains potent today. 

In A Geographical Survey, Rose Marie Cromwell examines the complex history of the American West and how competing myths and histories have shaped the land. The project is a political and personal reunion for Cromwell, who grew up in the region and returns as an artist, mother and environmentalist grappling with the legacy of her past and anxiety for the future. “As we get older, and our identities form, understanding the significance of where you are from and how it’s shaped who you are and your values feels important, especially as a parent,” says Cromwell, who lives in Miami. “The project is a homecoming of sorts. I wanted to look back and figure out how I became who I am.”

Cromwell was born in Sacramento and raised in Seattle, with a few years spent in Alaska. After experiencing “turbulent” teenage years, she staked her claim to a separate existence, pursuing it single-mindedly. “My parents divorced, and then my mom and stepdad divorced,” she says. “My sense of family fell apart, and there wasn‘t really a home to return to. I had this distaste for the West and just wanted to leave and create a new journey without looking back.” 

By contrast, Cromwell is now deliberately seeking the West. Her decision to make work there began as an attempt to reconcile her past. In 2022, she travelled to off-the-grid locations throughout New Mexico and northern California with her mother and three-year-old daughter. In the images she took, the women rove freely in nature, enjoying simple pleasures, liberated and radiant. We see Cromwell’s mother showering outdoors, her soft, crinkled skin revitalised in the mist. Her daughter squats to pee in another frame, returning water to the land. The cropping of these photographs is tight and affectionate – performative in the way they reveal how close Cromwell is to her collaborators and their sense of unity.

The simplicity of childhood

Similar to Eclipse, Cromwell’s previous body of work that describes the challenges of early motherhood, A Geographical Survey is less about idyllic images and more about the interiority of motherhood and the healing power of intimacy. We are privy to private moments between the family – vulnerable, tender and reflective – illuminating the cyclical nature of care and the uncanny ability of new generations to heal old wounds unknowingly. “I feel like I’m reckoning with a transition point,” says Cromwell. “You see your child on the way in and your mother on the way out. The reality that you are standing in the middle and you can see your past and the future is palpable. This anxiety is exacerbated by motherhood – will this land still be here for my daughter’s adult life? In many ways, this work is about me grasping for life, and yet it feels like sand running through my fingers.”

In part, the project has been fuelled by Cromwell’s nostalgia for a simpler time. Specifically, childhood summers piled into a minivan with her parents and three siblings, driving across the West. On these long road trips, Cromwell began to build a spiritual relationship with the region, subconsciously feeling a pull towards the sacred Badlands but not fully understanding why. “Our journeys were full of epic landscapes, stopping off in small towns and listening to tall tales from the locals,” she recalls. “My stepdad was from Montana and into cowboy culture, and I got my majestic and mystical view of the West from him.” 

While the magical aura of the West still captivates Cromwell, her intention is to animate the landscape as a complex character in its own right. Shifting between scenes that feel active and alive to others that remain fragile and chaotic, she reveals the land’s long history of exploitation through multiple perspectives. “[The West has] been ravaged environmentally, Cromwell says. “There’s a history of nuclear testing and huge water issues, and the devastating reality of climate change is taking hold. I’m trying to reflect upon these realities while also thinking about how a new Western landscape is emerging.”

Cromwell uses caught and constructed gestures – people and place are equal protagonists in her photographs – to look at what exists between the lines of history and mythology. Quietly disorientating, her images create tension through restrictive structures, foreboding shadows and shifting perspectives illuminating conflicting power dynamics. The project recalls Kristine Potter’s Manifest and Susan Lipper’s Domesticated Land, works that seek to complicate the heroic ideology of the American West by anchoring untold or hidden truths. 

Inescapable here is the advent of photography and how it aligns perfectly with the expansion of the American West and its mythology. The role of survey photographers such as Carleton Watkins and Timothy O’Sullivan was to picture the newly acquired terrain as vast, glorious and receptive territory. Their work helped cement the area as a symbol of American aspiration – a wild land full of economic possibilities just waiting to be tamed. In direct riposte, Cromwell reaches for an entirely different framing, not just through a feminist lens but in an attempt to subvert the medium’s colonial past.

Yet it is not the enduring devotion towards recoding of the Western myth that makes A Geographical Survey so captivating, but the subtle and nuanced ways Cromwell uses photography to reveal the messy complexity of our humanity. As people, we shift – and our environment changes in response. The project describes this fraught push-pull by presenting what remains. Part of the work‘s beauty is characterised by perseverance and survival – not just to lay bare difficult truths of the past, but to metabolise them and find new ways to move forward.

rosemariecromwell.com

Correction: In the original article first published in the Performance Issue 7912, February 2023, the image “Mother in the Garden Shed” was cropped in error to a landscape orientation. It is in fact a portrait image, presented correctly here, left of the first pull-out quote.