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The
Detroit Photographic Company is first noted in city registers of Detroit
in 1888. They supplied photographs for all purposes - especially for use
in books, magazines, and advertising specialties such as calendars and blotters.
Many of the prints were of large framing size or suitable for long advertising
hangers in the custom of the day. However, the small company's specialty
was religious material of the Madonna type.
In the late 1890's William A. Livingstone became active in the management
of the company and at the urging of a new acquaintance, photographer Edwin
H. Husher, he began investigating a little known and unique photo-reproduction
process called Photochrom. During the summer of 1897 Mr. Livingstone
went to Zurich, Switzerland where this process had been developed and succeeded
in arranging a contract with the Swiss owners by which he obtained exclusive
ownership and rights to the Photochrom process in America.
Concurrently, the United States Congress authorized the One Penny Postcard.
William Livingstone immediately saw the lucrative potential of the souvenir
postcard illustrated with color photographs, a field in which he had the
means to be a pioneer. At the urging of Husher, Livingstone invited the
famous landscape photographer William Henry Jackson to join his Detroit
company as a partner. Jackson accepted the offer, bringing with him
to Detroit an estimated 10,000 negatives which would provide the core of
the company's now wide-ranging photographic archive.
At the height of its success, the company employed some forty artisans and
a dozen or more traveling salesmen. In a typical year they would publish
an estimated seven million prints. |
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