W I D E Screen History

It’s not exactly a secret, but many museum visitors might be surprised to find that the art and exhibits on display usually make up a small percentage of a facility’s total collection, and the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City is no different. Despite showing thousands of paintings, sculptures, and photographs—not to mention the interactive exhibits like Prosperity Junction and Liichokoshkomo’—there is a wealth of art and scholarship behind the scenes, waiting for a chance to be shown.

Curator and archivist Samantha Schafer says part of the impetus for the new W I D E W E S T exhibit was the opportunity to see classic panoramic photos restored and displayed for the first time.

“We don’t have the equipment or resources to restore some of these photos on site, so this was a good opportunity to send some off to conservation,” she says. “I think we have forty or fifty more that need to be unrolled.”

Some of the photos were complete mysteries until they had been restored and returned to the museum, she says. That’s because of the way panoramic photos have traditionally been stored: rolled up in cardboard tubes and stowed away in boxes. It’s not as simple as just taking a photo out of the tube and flattening it on a table, because of the way the medium degrades over time.

The story behind the display is fascinating, but so are the photos themselves. Walking around with Schafer on a Wednesday morning, the exhibit drew plenty of looky-loos who were eager to pick up one of the provided magnifying glasses and begin examining the pictures in earnest.

“It feels so good to have gotten them out here for people to see and realize, ‘I’m not the only one spending time poring over these to see what’s in them,’” she says. “This really gives people the widest view of the West, if you’ll excuse the pun.”

That’s because, in addition to plenty of expansive rodeo shots, Schafer chose other interesting subjects that don’t necessarily show Western life the way people expect.

“There’s one with a chihuahua and a monkey sitting on the back of a donkey at the front of this rodeo group,” she says. “I spent a good ten minutes just staring at this one photo trying to figure out what was on the donkey’s back.”

The breadth of the photos makes the exhibit a bit like a Where’s Waldo? book. With a magnifying glass in hand, there’s no doubt viewers will find something unexpected.

“I like to come up here and see what’s caught other people’s attention, because they’re finding things I missed,” she says.

While paintings are very deliberate, photos truly capture a moment (or, with older cameras, several moments) in time. That’s why you can find someone cracking up at a joke in one picture and a woman in a giant leopard-print coat on horseback outside of a movie theater in another. Since the subjects in paintings are chosen, they only reflect what the artist saw or wanted to show. But these panoramic photos include details that might contradict the image people had of the West in that time.

Older photos were not treated with much reverence back in the day, as evidenced by the number with notes written on them, sometimes detailing where farms had once been in a photo of an oilfield or marking points of interest, like a controversial sculpture in the back of a group on horseback.

One of Schafer’s favorites caught my attention as well. The 1916 photo of the New York Cavalry Company during the first World War captured a staggering number of horses being fed, as well as a few interesting details that only show up after staring at the picture for a while. The radiating lines of horses and the city of tents behind them looked almost like a still from a Wes Anderson movie. And the timing of the shot was perfect, too, since most of the horses were busy chowing down at the trough, they come through surprisingly clearly, even though shutter speeds were much slower at the time.

Other panoramas bring up new questions for Schafer, like the photo of the 1942 rodeo with military service members in uniform ready to perform. Of course many of the people in the rodeos at the time would also be enlisted, but that hadn’t occurred to me until I saw it in black and white.

What will you discover at W I D E W E S T? There’s no way to know without heading to the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum through October 15, grabbing a magnifying glass, and settling in for a good, long stare.