How Photography Shaped the American Narrative

The United States was founded in 1776, but did not begin to see itself until the autumn of 1839, when daguerreotypes, the first form of photograph, reached American cities. You could argue the US began again on the morning it could look at its own face.

At first photography seemed to answer the democratic promise of 1776. A portrait was no longer reserved for the rich; almost anyone could now leave a trace of their existence. The gold rush became one of the first great American dramas to find the camera: ordinary diggers squinting into the lens, looking beyond it for gold. A more emblematic American scene can scarcely be imagined: what would be called the American Dream, a lottery everyone plays and very few win. The myth was not that they all found gold – it was that the search itself made them American.

The camera began fixed in a studio, but soon moved outward to the places where the country was inventing itself. Carleton Watkins helped invent the story of the west as the nation’s destiny, empty and sublime. Lewis Wickes Hine, Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks turned labour, poverty and segregation into evidence and indictment. Robert Capa landed with the first wave at Omaha beach on D-day, and died on assignment a decade later, his camera still in his hand. Photography did not simply record the American story; it interpreted and created it. Now we live within a constant stream of images. We no longer encounter events first and photos second: for most, the image has become the event.

Photography became the US’s perfect art form because truth and myth could occupy the same frame. They coexist more easily than we like to think. Even the US’s most truthful images mix fact with invention. The body of the whip-scarred man in The Scourged Back (1863) was turned into evidence of slavery’s brutality for the world to see. Magazine editors merged him with another escaper to create a single abolitionist hero and a tale of redemption. The cruelty was real, the narrative around the image partly made up.

In the 1869 Champagne Photo of the transcontinental railroad, two locomotives meet, bottles are raised and the nation imagines itself joined from sea to sea. But the Chinese workers who laid much of the track are absent, their erasure an echo of the human cost of the labour.

A few decades later, two white men in suits posed on a mountain of bison skulls bound for industrial processing. The photograph records not only slaughter, and the elimination of the plains nations, but a worldview: animals as raw material, destruction as enterprise. The myth was the land’s inexhaustibility. The men are mistaking extinction for triumph.

The same fantasy of endless land helped produce the Dust Bowl, which deepened the Great Depression of the 1930s. Farmers tore up deep-rooted prairie grass, bringing drought; the dry soil rose in black storms and blew east. The catastrophe was most often photographed through its victims: Dorothea Lange’s exhausted faces; the road west; the mother made emblematic. Florence Owens Thompson, the woman in Lange’s Migrant Mother, spent the rest of her life resenting the photograph that made her the face of American poverty. The image gave the nation an icon; it did not give its subject control over what she had come to mean.

Almost a century after The Scourged Back, another image confronted the US with the realities of racial violence. When 14-year-old Emmett Till was murdered by two white men in 1955, his mother chose an open casket to force white America to look at what had been done to her son. When the mainstream white press would not print the photographs, she found a Black photographer and made the image testify.

Some pictures are able to expose what a nation refuses to see; others are recruited into stories that simplify what they show. In 2025, World Press Photo suspended Nick Ut’s authorship attribution for The Terror of War, the photograph long known as “Napalm Girl”, after a rival claim that the photo was taken by a Vietnamese stringer. The napalm had been dropped by a South Vietnamese plane, her own side. Only the devastated child in the frame, Phan Thi Kim Phúc, remains beyond dispute.

In Julio Cortez’s 2020 photograph from Minneapolis following the murder of George Floyd, a protester carries the stars and stripes upside down, turning a patriotic symbol into a signal of distress. The image asks a question we are left to answer in the US’s 250th year: is showing the nation its own violence a betrayal of its promise, or the only way to keep it?

Not every myth is a lie. The workmen eating lunch on a girder high above New York in 1932 are a breathtaking image of aspiration mixed with nonchalance, even if the photograph was probably staged rather than spontaneous. The sailor kissing a woman in Times Square on V-J Day can still hold the joy of victory, even now that it is shadowed by her words, “It wasn’t my choice.” The legendary musicians in 1958’s A Great Day in Harlem far exceed the society that narrowed where Black brilliance was allowed to gather. Woodstock was mud, hunger, commerce, youth, anger, hope, the stubborn belief that another US might be possible.

Iconic photographs do more than show the US what happened. They show the country inventing itself from evidence, denial, desire, grief. Every image asks not only what was made visible, but what a nation needed it to mean.

Sarah Churchwell’s most recent book is The Wrath to Come: Gone With the Wind and the Lies America Tells.

Picture captions by Felix Bazalgette and Alice Robb

Gold rush miners, 1852

By Joseph Blaney Starkweather

In January 1848, workers building a sawmill in a remote part of California found flakes of gold in a stream, sparking a gold rush and an explosion in the fledgling state’s population. One newcomer was New York daguerreotypist Joseph Blaney Starkweather, who took this portrait of workers operating a sluice box, used for filtering gold out of river water. FB

Yosemite, 1861

By Carleton Watkins

When photographer Carleton Watkins trekked into the Yosemite valley in 1861 – with a dozen mules bearing tripods, glass plates and a darkroom tent (weighing in at nearly 1,000kg) – few Americans, apart from the indigenous Ahwahneechee, had seen Yosemite in person; then-president Abraham Lincoln had never been to California.

The resulting 30 images – of granite mountains, waterfalls, foggy peaks – caused a sensation when they were shown in New York in 1862, and increased support for the nascent conservation movement. In 1864, Lincoln passed legislation to preserve Yosemite “for public use, resort, and recreation”, laying the groundwork for the 1916 creation of the National Park Service. AR

The dead of Antietam, 1862

By Alexander Gardner

In October 1862, an exhibition unlike anything seen before opened on the corner of Broadway and 10th Street in New York. Up until then, much war photography had focused on posed officers in clean uniforms and famous moments staged or recreated for the camera. Alexander Gardner rejected this romanticism and instead turned his lens on the decomposing corpses spread across the battlefield in the days after a civil war battle reckoned by many to be one of the bloodiest in American history, with more than 22,000 killed on 17 September 1862. With his gruesome, forensic images, it was as though, one journalist later wrote, Gardner had “brought the bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets”. FB

The Scourged Back, 1863

By William D McPherson and J Oliver

Little is known about the man some sources call “Peter” whose wounds galvanised the abolitionist cause – only that he escaped a Louisiana plantation, that his back bore the scars of savage beatings and that he enlisted in the Union Army in 1863. When The Scourged Back appeared in Harper’s Weekly on 4 July 1863, it was a “visualisation of just how violent and inhumane the institution of slavery was” and “changed northern understandings” of its inhumanity, says Barbara Krauthamer, a history professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and co-author of Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery. The US had been embroiled in the civil war for two years by then and it had, she adds, “clearly become about ending slavery”. The image remains contentious, with reports last year that a national park had taken it down from an exhibition in line with an executive order from the Trump administration calling on institutions to do away with materials that disparage “Americans past or living”. AR

East and West Shaking Hands at Laying of Last Rail (“The Champagne Photo”), 1869

By Andrew J Russell

On 10 May 1869, the final spikes of the transcontinental railroad were hammered into the tracks, ending a six-year project to unite the east and west coasts. “It was seen as a symbol of US ingenuity and progress,” says Julia H Lee, professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine and author of The Racial Railroad.

At Promontory Summit in the Utah desert, an engineer from the Union Pacific Railroad company, which laid the tracks from Nebraska to Utah, and one from the Central Pacific Railroad, which was responsible for the western half, reached across with a bottle and glasses. The men seen here are administrators, investors, engineers – “the folks who made the money when the railroad was completed”, Lee says. The thousands of Chinese workers who shovelled rocks and dug tunnels were, she points out, “not memorialised in the same way”. AR

Bison skull mountain, 1892

Photographer unknown

In the 19th century there was an unprecedented slaughter of wild animals by white settlers in the US. Billions of prairie dogs and passenger pigeons, and tens of millions of beavers were hunted to the point of extinction. Whole ecosystems, and the human cultures based around them, were irrevocably altered. Perhaps the most famous near-extinction was the bison’s: a population possibly as high as 60 million in 1800 was down to a few hundred by 1892. Cree scholar Tasha Hubbard argues that this was intimately tied to the genocide of indigenous peoples, pointing to a popular saying at the time: “Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.” FB

Italian Family Seeking Lost Baggage, Ellis Island, 1905

By Lewis Wickes Hine

Almost a million people passed through the Ellis Island immigration processing centre in 1905, and roughly 20% were detained: stowaways, unaccompanied women, anarchists, Bolsheviks, criminals … Lewis Hine, a sociologist, teacher and photographer who began visiting the island, hoped his portraits would combat anti-immigrant feeling. FB

12,000 employees outside Ford Motor Company Highland Park Plant, 1913

By CR Vallin

Inspired by the workflow at slaughterhouses, Henry Ford in 1913 implemented the moving assembly line in his Michigan factory, cutting the production time on a Model T car from over 12 hours to 93 minutes, and turning skilled labourers into cogs in a machine. Perhaps those workers were grateful to be given two hours away from the conveyor belt to pose for this photo. Hailed as the most expensive picture ever taken, due to the hours of labour lost, it circulated for years on picture postcards and Ford brochures, a symbol of the new age of mass production. AR

Police emptying barrels of beer during prohibition, 1920

By George Rinhart

In 1920 the US embarked on a sociopolitical experiment never attempted before, or since: a national prohibition on the sale, manufacture and transportation of alcohol. Brought about after more than a century of campaigning by the temperance movement, the policy – which ran until 1933 – is now regarded as a disaster; the government lost out on tax revenue after the alcohol industry was pushed underground, into the hands of violent organised crime groups; and expenditure on enforcement measures soared. This image, by press photographer George Rinhart, shows police officers emptying seized alcohol down the drain. FB

Lunch Atop a Skyscraper, 1932

By Charles C Ebbets

It was the height of the Great Depression and the Rockefeller Center developers feared their 67-storey RCA Building, nearing completion, would sit vacant, like the Empire State Building a few blocks south. So a photoshoot was set up, and the image of 11 construction workers perched on a steel beam, schmoozing over lunch 260 metres up, came to symbolise a certain brand of New York nonchalance. AR

Migrant Mother, 1936

By Dorothea Lange

When Franklin D Roosevelt was elected president in 1933, four years into a decade of economic dysfunction, unemployment rates stood at 25% and a series of droughts and dust storms across the south central area of the country had led up to 2.5 million people to head west in search of work.

One such migrant was Florence Owens Thompson, a Cherokee woman photographed by Dorothea Lange in 1936, while she was living in a temporary camp with her children in Nipomo, California. Though the photograph became iconic, its subject, who remained unnamed until the late 1970s, later told a reporter that she “can’t get a penny out of it”. FB

At the Time of the Louisville Flood, 1937

By Margaret Bourke-White

In January 1937, the Ohio River flooded, leaving a million people homeless and turning Louisville, Kentucky, into “a beleaguered castle surrounded by a moat”, Margaret Bourke-White, Life’s first female staff photographer, recalled in her memoir. She captured these Black flood victims queueing for supplies from a relief agency, while an apple-cheeked white family looms over them. The billboard was one of thousands the National Association of Manufacturers hoped would lower support for FDR’s progressive New Deal. The photo has often been misunderstood as a generic Depression-era bread line, and was even used as anti-America propaganda by Nazi minister Joseph Goebbels with the caption, “Thank God, we have a better way.” AR

American Gothic, 1942

By Gordon Parks

Ella Watson’s husband died in 1927, leaving her as sole provider for her family. By 1942, aged 59, she was supporting them on an annual wage of $1,080, working as a cleaning lady in the offices of the Farm Security Administration in Washington DC. Here she met Gordon Parks, a young African American photographer who had just arrived in DC. Furious at the violent system of segregation in the nation’s capital, he wanted “to photograph every rotten discrimination in the city”.

Parks learned that Watson had joined the FSA at the same time as a white woman of similar background and education in the late 1920s; over the years the white employee had risen up the ranks, and Watson was now cleaning her office. That summer he made about 100 photographs with Watson, documenting her life and work, including this, whose bitterly acerbic title references Grant Wood’s painting of 1930. FB

D-day landing, 1944

By Robert Capa

Early on 6 June 1944, war photographer Capa – his cameras packed in oilskin bags – boarded the USS Samuel