Real West comes into focus in Cartersville

Southeastern Cowboy Festival and Symposium

Thursday through Sunday. The symposium, on Friday, includes four photography talks, among them a discussion by Peter Essick of Stone Mountain on “Shooting for National Geographic” (2 p.m.). The cowboy festival, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday and noon-5 p.m. Sunday, includes re-enactments of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Native American dancing, and a Western marketplace. Plus, cowboy singer Roy Rogers Jr. plays Grand Theatre concerts at 2 and 7 p.m. Saturday ($30; under 16, $5 for matinee only).

Combined museum and festival admission: $10; 65 and over, $8; students, $7; 12 and under, free (with parent or guardian). Booth Western Art Museum, 501 Museum Drive, Cartersville. 770-387-1300, www.boothmuseum.org.

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More options: Cartersville-Bartow County Convention & Visitors Bureau, 770-387-1357, www.visitcartersvillega.org.

As vast as the American West is geographically, it looms equally large as a wellspring of inspiration, as reflected in countless movies, novels, paintings and photographs.

When National Geographic magazine began organizing an exhibition and companion book drawn from its nearly 125-year history of photographing in the West, it had to sift through more than 1.2 million archived images. That 75-picture exhibit, “National Geographic Greatest Portraits of the American West” opens here at the Booth Western Art Museum on Saturday. The exhibition also will open at the same time at eight other Western-themed museums across the country and the National Geographic Museum in Washington.

“It was a daunting task,” Booth Executive Director Seth Hopkins said of the winnowing through the magazine’s vast archive for an exhibit that stretches from an 1873 William Henry Jackson stereographic image of Colorado’s Mountain of the Holy Cross to a 2011 landscape in California’s Ansel Adams Wilderness by Peter Essick of Stone Mountain.

The inclusion of photographs by Adams (“Clearing Winter Storm” and “Half Dome,” both shot in Yosemite Valley in 1937) and Essick (part of an homage to his one-time mentor that was published in the magazine last October) is considered a positive omen at the Booth.

The exhibit “Ansel Adams: A Legacy,” a retrospective of 131 images printed by the master photographer, helped the decade-old museum set an attendance record (58,000) just last year.

“‘Ansel Adams’ was definitely a tipping point moment for us,” said Hopkins, who in addition to running the Booth serves as president of the Museums West Consortium, an alliance of the 13 largest Western art museums in the U.S. “It was one that really got a lot of people who had been hearing about the Booth, and thinking about visiting, to finally venture out.” Notably, Hopkins said, many of those first-time visitors were from metro Atlanta, a market that had been tough to crack for the museum located roughly a half-hour north of I-285 off I-75.

More than an attendance boost, the Adams exhibit also sparked the creation of the Booth Photography Guild, a group of photographers with skills from hobbyist to professional whose works, including several taken in Adams’ beloved Yosemite Valley, are mounted in a current juried exhibit on the Booth’s lower level.

The 100-plus guild members also have a new showcase, Downtown Gallery, a storefront space that the Booth opened this month at 13 N. Wall St., mere steps from the museum’s south entrance in Cartersville’s pedestrian-friendly downtown. In addition to photography, the spacious gallery displays paintings by regional artists as well as framed prints, posters, books and sculpture by artists represented in the Booth’s permanent collection.

But for photography lovers, the main Cartersville course unquestionably is “Greatest Portraits of the American West,” a broad survey of styles and subjects, from traditional black and white landscapes such as Gabriel Moulin’s moody 1916 depiction of Yosemite’s El Capitan monolith enshrouded in clouds to Roger Ressmeyer’s otherworldly 1993 image of lasers shooting into the starry sky from Kirkland Air Force Base’s Starfire Optical Range in New Mexico.

Hopkins believes the fetching landscapes, such as James L. Amos’ 1989 image of Colorado’s Chimney Rock illuminated by a horizontal lightning flash and Jim Richardson’s 2008 shot of the Milky Way framed by Utah’s Owachomo Bridge natural rock formation, will hold broad appeal.

“You see these images and you’re even more motivated to go see it for yourself,” he said. “Nothing replaces being there in person. But if you can’t do that, this is a great way to experience it vicariously.”

Beyond tempting armchair travelers, “Greatest Portraits” provides plenty of fodder for viewers with environmental concerns.

One of the most potent photos is an 1892 shot of two loggers and a woman dwarfed by the 90-foot circumference of a century-old California sequoia that they had just spent eight days felling. The trio pose stiffly, in that stoic, standing-still-for-the-long-exposure, early-photography way, their emotions hard to read yet their pride of conquest not difficult to project.

It’s hard for the viewer, seeing it in a different light 120 years later, not to feel sickened if not enraged.

Photography’s ability to evoke emotional responses is a topic James C. McNutt addresses in the introduction to the exhibition’s companion book of the same title (National Geographic Books, $30).

“Even the most iconic locations of the West that appear in movies, such as the Monument Valley backdrops in John Ford’s films, do not convey the sense of being able to travel to the location itself. The movie West is a place in past time,” writes McNutt, president and CEO of the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole, Wyo. “National Geographic photographs, in contrast, appear in real time, hot off the press.”

And now at a cowboy museum with a growing affinity for photography, as well.