n 1982, the Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University accepted an etching portfolio by artist Amos W. Sangster (1833-1903) entitled The Niagara River and Falls from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario. A gift from the Bethlehem Steel Corporation of Lackawanna, New York, this monumental portfolio contains fifty full-plate etchings one hundred three vignettes, and a 36,000 word commentary on the history of the Niagara Frontier by James Warner Ward. At this time, a citizen's committee called the Amos W. Sangster Niagara River Centennial Committee proposed an exhibition of the portfolio to recognize the 100th year anniversary of its publication in 1886. Between 1982 and 1986, the Sangster Committee, in conjunction with the Castellani Art Museum, organized an exhibition of the portfolio and four concurrent events. These projects were funded by the Museum Aid Program of the New York State Council on the Arts, as well as corporate and private funders.

From the beginning, the committee had also intended to commission an internationally renowned photographer to create a contemporary series of landscape photographs that would closely parallel Sangster's etchings of the entire span of the Niagara River. The Committee publicized this intention and received a wide variety of proposals from a number of photographers. They eventually decided to entrust the project to photographer John Pfahl, who had long been investigating nineteenth century pictorial conventions in such exquisite landscape portfolios as Power Places (1983), Picture Windows (1981), Altered Landscapes (1976) , and other works. With a grant from the Visual Artists Program of the New York State Council on the Arts, the Castellani Art Museum commissioned Pfahl to photograph the river over a period of nine months during 1985-86.

Pfahl attempted to use the working methods of Amos Sangster as closely as possible, spending many days hiking along the Niagara River, finding his vantage points, and, most important, approaching his subject with the same reverent appreciation of the Niagara scene and painterly aesthetic evinced by Sangster. The photographs that result are serenely picturesque vistas, incorporating a sense of the awesome and sublime that belongs to Pfahl's own, uniquely spiritual attitude toward nature. Fifty-two horizontal Kodak Ektacolor color-coupler prints were produced. The Pfahl photographs and Sangster etchings were exhibited together for the first time at the Castellani Art Museum (then called the Bascaglia-Castellani Art Gallery) in 1986. They were then developed into a traveling exhibition which was distributed by the Visual Studies Workshop exhibition program.

The photographs are accompanied by a publication, Arcadia Revisited: Niagara River and Falls from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario, published by the University of New Mexico Press (1988), with essays by Estelle Jussim, Anthony Bannon, and John Pfahl.