The American Southwest sparks the imagination of people around the world. A steady diet of Western films from the golden age of Western movies and TV series, the 1950s, provided generations of Americans yearning to go west and seek out the vast open landscapes. But also as the movies and TV series spread around the globe, the American West became a global and universal theme for escape.
I recall being in Germany in the 1970s and playing cowboys and Indians with the neighborhood kids who only knew of America from movies and TV. As far as they were concerned, we were all cowboys living on the frontier.
Movie studios used the impressive, expansive, usual and unique landscape of the American Southwest to pull movie goers in cramped cities and monotony of the suburbs into the theaters.
Most grade A and many B westerns were filmed in color and on location. For example, The Last Wagon (Sedona, Arizona), The Far Country(Canada), Escape from Fort Bravo (Death Valley), Run of the Arrow (St. George, Utah), and Shane (Jackson Hole, Wyoming).
In the 1950s TV started to invade the American homes and started what has become the long slow decline of the movie theater. To compete with the small screen in living rooms across America, movies had to provide something more spectacular, the movie studios answer to small black and white screens was color and the wide screen provided by CinemaScope, VistaVision, SuperScope, Cinerama.
Modern stories told in the American Southwest like the TV series “Breaking Bad” and “Westworld” and movies like John Carpenter’s “Vampires” which takes place and was filmed in the southwest (filmed in Sante Fe, NM), the comedy “City Slickers”, the “Horse Whisperer” with Robert Redford, “No Country for Old Men”, “El Mariachi” and “Hell or High Water”.
Of course these days plenty of people live in the deserts of the Southwest with cities like Las Vegas, Nevada and Phoenix, Arizona being some of the fastest growing cities in America.
All the while the demand for Southwestern decor is high with images of cactus, Southwest landscapes, remote ghost towns and relics of the past.
Some museum quality framed and matted prints or canvas, metal, acrylic, or wood prints or even some themed throw pillows or fleece blankets with images from the Southwest region of America can add to your Southwestern decor.
Browse the images in the Western collection of over two hundred options of fine art photography from the Western states.