William Henry Jackson recorded the natural curiosities and wonders of the West at a time when photography was in its initial stages. Thirty years before Ansel Adams (1902–1984) was born, Jackson had explored the commercial and artistic possibilities of capturing the canyons, geysers, valleys, and waterfalls of Yellowstone and the Rockies and other majestic landscapes.
As photography evolved, he changed, too, incorporating the newest styles and procedures necessary to shoot not just imposing landmarks such as the Grand Canyon, but also Native American encampments and tribal chiefs, lost and enchanting cities, and overnight boom-and-bust mining towns.
Learning the Art
Son of George Jackson, a blacksmith, and Harriet Jackson, an artistic watercolorist, William Henry Jackson was born in 1843 in Keeseville, New York. Four years earlier, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre invented the first daguerreotype in France, and America embraced this new invention. Indeed, the first decade of Jackson’s life coincided with some of the earliest determining events in photography’s history.
In the early 1850s, stereoscopic views produced by camera were introduced commercially in the United States, and in 1851, collodion wet-plate glass negatives were introduced by Englishman Frederick Scott Archer (1813–1857).
A Life in the West
After choosing to remain in Omaha, William Henry and his brother, Edward Jackson, opened Jackson Brothers Photography Studio, and the young entrepreneur’s enthusiasm and good fortune as a photographer grew. By 1868, Jackson was producing a series of Indian portraits in the Omaha area.
The following year was a significant one in both personal and professional terms: He married Mollie Greer (she died giving birth, and he later remarried and had three children) and undertook his first extensive landscape project, spending the summer photographing along the Union Pacific line.
In his 1940 autobiography “Time Exposure,” he referred to the railroad as “something truly earth-shaking” and wrote that he would have “been out on the grade with [his] cameras” whether he was compensated for his time and travels or not. Evidence of this great passion is a singular photo from 1869 of Jackson in Echo Canyon, Utah, intently inspecting a glass plate outside his tent, which doubled as a makeshift darkroom.
Around that time, he met geologist Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden (1829–1887) in Cheyenne, Wyoming. In 1870, Jackson took a job with Hayden’s U.S. Geological and Geographic Survey of the Territories, traveling with his camera to the wildest edges of Wyoming Territory.
Jackson excelled as Hayden’s official survey photographer. The unique prospect of visiting and photographing places that no one had ever photographed must not have been lost on the wide-eyed and ambitious young man. Hayden was delighted with the accurate and informational nature of Jackson’s work, and in Hayden, Jackson could sympathize with the man’s appreciation of the sphere of photography as “the nearest approach to a truthful delineation of nature.”
Hayden rehired Jackson in 1871, and the two explored the Yellowstone region together. After exploring the Grand Tetons, Jackson returned to Yellowstone the following year. In 1873, the Survey focused on the Rockies, where Jackson took pictures of the Mount of the Holy Cross. The following year, he worked in southwestern Colorado, investigating and illustrating the lives of the Ute people, as well as exploring the cliff dwellings in Mancos Canyon near Mesa Verde.
While documenting a number of fragile archeological shelters and sites, Jackson made the first photograph of a cliff dwelling on Mesa Verde in 1874. It was of Two Story House, located on Moccasin Mesa, close to the present boundaries of Mesa Verde National Park. The pooled photographs and writings of two adventurers, Jackson and his colleague William Henry Holmes (1846–1933), introduced the archaeological wonders of Mesa Verde to the world.
In 1875, Jackson expanded his work in the Mesa Verde area and made his first “mammoth” plate negatives, spanning on average 18 inches by 22 inches. He knew the Mesa Verde so intimately that Hayden tasked him with the job of creating a model of Mancos Canyon ruins to exhibit at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.
Constantly Evolving With the Medium
Hayden’s expeditions ended in 1878. Jackson, however, was receptive to new possibilities and stayed knowledgeable of the latest photography trends and techniques. The same year that gelatin dry plates became commercially available in America in 1879, Jackson opened a commercial photo studio in Denver. His studio made wise use of his unique stock and inventory, making available his collected works of powerful landscape views and beautiful vistas of rivers, plains, deserts, and mountains.Photography continued to grow and progress right before Jackson’s eyes, including in 1889—the year George Eastman (1854–1932) began production of nitrocellulose film. In 1892, Jackson and landscape painter and friend Thomas Moran (1837–1926) traveled along the Santa Fe route, and Jackson embarked on a photographic trip on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.
Somehow, Jackson managed to remain solvent in his practice, weathering economic downturns and broad depressions. In 1893, he was selected to photograph the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. His subsequent travels were wide-ranging after joining the World’s Transportation Commission (a society that studied global transportation) for lengthy excursions through the Near and Far East, as exotic as China and Russia.
In 1897, he joined the Detroit Photographic Company (later becoming the Detroit Publishing Company), which specialized in mass-market postcards and reproduced views. By that time, Jackson had amassed a vast collection of negatives, possibly one of the world’s largest, and the partnership with the company allowed for the preservation and expansion of his archives.
After the Detroit Publishing Company declared bankruptcy, Jackson relocated to Washington. A lifelong diarist, he published “The Pioneer Photographer: Rocky Mountain Adventures with a Camera” in 1929. Jackson also had a knack for painting, and in 1936, he accepted a commission from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration to create survey murals. The following year, he worked with the National Park Service producing drawings and paintings of national parks.
In 1940, William Henry Jackson, an undeniable representation and firsthand witness to the timeline of the progress of photography in America, published an autobiography titled “Time Exposure.” Two years later, he died in New York City at age 99.
