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 After
traveling extensively and attempting to make a living by making photographs,
William Henry Jackson combined his artistic skill in the fledgling art of
photography with his spirit for adventure when he began photographing for
the U. S. Geological Survey in 1870. The Survey was set up in 1867 under
the auspices of the Land Office of the Department of the Interior in Washington.
Designed to create an official record of the vast unknown territory of the
West, the Survey consisted of about twenty men including topographers, a
meteorologist, an ethnologist, and artists. For Jackson, the experience
of working with the Survey would prove priceless. It took him all over the
West during a period of nine years, establishing him as one of the foremost
landscape photographers in the country and assuring his renoun.
During the 1880s Jackson chose his own destinations and began to take his photographs
with more of an eye to the bottom line. He continued to travel, but now
it was for the railroad companies and hotels that saw the value of advertising
their scenic attractions. In 1892, Jackson was offered the opportunity to
travel around the world by a grandiose publicity man from the Baltimore
and Ohio Railroad. Called the World's Transportation Commission, the tour
lasted seventeen months and took Jackson and the others to Europe, northern
Africa, Australia, and deep into many parts of Asia.
In the United States, one area that Jackson returned to time and time again was Yellowstone.
In fact, Jackson's photographs played a large part in influencing Congress
to create Yellowstone National Park in 1872. But the camera's inability
to capture the astonishing colors of the area frustrated Jackson, who fell
back on painting techniques and other manipulations to achieve the desired
effects.
The development in Switzerland of the Photochrom process for continuous-tone,
full-color renditions from of black and white negatives changed all that.
The process was licensed in America to the Detroit Photographic Company,
which Jackson joined as a partner in 1897 and to which he sold the bulk
of his enormous archive of negatives. The color produced by the Photochrome
process was astonishingly naturalistic, and it was to this process that
Jackson devoted his final years of active photography. |
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