Organized by the Figge Art Museum, Magnetic West features over 160 photographs by some of the most renowned photographers of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Picturing the west as a metaphor for promise and peril, the exhibition and accompanying essays explore issues of identity, implications of living in a changing landscape, and the centrality of Native and immigrant communities to the essential dynamism of the region. Including images made by artists from the U.S. and abroad, Magnetic West expands the dialogue of how our view of the west has evolved from the 19th century to today.

Assembled from many public and private collections, it includes important works by Robert Adams, Edward Burtynsky, Laura Gilpin, Zig Jackson, Elaine Mayes, Chandra McCormick, Cara Romero, Wendy Red Star, Victoria Sambunaris, Carleton Watkins, Wim Wenders and many others.

The book includes essays by Andrew Kensett (Visible Figures, Ground Truths: Peopling the Western Landscape), Vero Rose Smith (Home on The Range), Andrew Wallace (The American West in Five Easy Pieces), Vanessa Sage (Identity and Representation in the American West), Arnold Genthe, Toyo Miyatake, Edward Curtis, Wil Wilson, Laura Gilpin, Blake Little, Mike Jones, Anja Niemi and by the a Meskwaki tribal member Ray Young Bear.