postcard sublime: william henry jackson's western landscapes

Visual Resources, Vol. XVII, pp. 417433 O 2001 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V. Reprints available directly from the publisher Published by license under Photocopying permitted by license only the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint,

part of Gordon and Breach Publishing, a member of the Taylor & Francis Group.

Postcard Sublime: William Henry Jackson's Western Landscapes

Ellen Handy

Photographic postcards are mass-produced and widely distributed images which participate broadly in the culture of their era. As messen- gers from the far side of the divide between elite and mass imagery, they offer different insights into visual culture than those familiar from works already in the photographic canon. They also shed light on the larger workings of the art historical enterprise by calling attention to the assumptions made about the nature and purpose of works of fine art photography in relation to these similar but more democratic and ephemeral objects. As the history of photography has become a familiarly accepted branch of the history of art, the medium's special intersection of fine art and documentation has become a high stakes question. Postcards, commonly relegated to status of "documentation" rather than addressed as works of art, have until recently been little studied by art historians. Their changing fortunes as collectors' objects and as scholars' concerns bespeaks larger changes in the shaping of art history, the art market, and public collections. Does such a marginal medium find itself appropriated by art history, or does it subvert that discourse? The work of William Henry Jackson (1843-1942) affords a valuable case study of photographic production, postcard publishing, image recycling from format to format, and the assimilation of both photographs and photographic postcards as fine art.

The large format photographic prints of Western landscape subjects for which Jackson is best known may be found in numerous art museums,

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but the postcards which sometimes feature identical images are less often to be found in such collections; historical societies and libraries are more likely to preserve photographic postcards in large numbers. In museums, Jackson's prints are apt to be housed side by side with those of other well-known figures of nineteenth century American landscape photography, such as Timothy O'Sullivan, and Carleton Watkins, whereas in library collections, the name of the maker of the postcard image is less likely to be identified as a principle of sorting than the name of the image's publisher. In fact, the very notion of the postcard in the museum context is almost inseparable from that of fine art reproduction: the typical museum shop product reproducing key works from the museum's collection. Most art historians have a close, even warm, relationship to such reproductive images which conveniently reproduce the works they study, but such reproductions are seldom the matter of study and analysis themselves. If the reproductive postcard is one of the basic units of art history, isn't it curious that postcards are so seldom addressed by scholars? Yet, perhaps too transparent a medium, they are neglected. And what of postcard images which are not photographs of canonical works in other media, but photographs of photographs themselves? Travel souvenirs, hobbyists' mainstays, and charmingly trivial artifacts of ephemera, such postcards previously fell outside the purviews of art history, unlike some other turn of the century ink-based images reproducing photographic images which will be discussed subsequently.

Postcards like Jackson's, which have a less ambiguous relationship to problems of originality and reproduction than fine art reproduction postcards, may be more easily approached by art historical analysis. Ironically, the history of photography first made progress in its attempts to find a place in the academy at just the moment when the tide of cri- tical discourse turned, and the death of the author was proclaimed. Simultaneously, critics not primarily identified as historians of photography became interested in photographs for their documentary, anon- ymous, democratic, and infinitely reproducible characteristics rather than for their resemblance to the older arts. Suddenly, the photograph without a maker was more compelling than that by a newly canonized master of the medium. Photography's ambiguous status in relation to fine art works in other media is equally characteristic of postcards as a genre. Postcards recapitulate photography's evolution: their complex relations with art, mass media, and with personal collecting and exchange practices; their intimacy of image and text; and their confron- tation of high and low culture, all mirror questions urgently under

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discussion in art history today, many of which can be addressed through the work of William Henry Jackson.

Jackson was an exceptionally prolific expeditionary photographer best known for his handsome, often impressively large albumen prints made during the 1860s and 70s from glass plate negatives in the landscapes of the American West, and particularly in the Yellowstone Valley, which in 1872 was designated a national park by Congress in part through the persuasive eloquence of Jackson's pictures. His photographs helped to make Western landscapes known to distant armchair travelers and to visitors, tourists and settlers from back East, and are themselves still well-known today. Yet these are not his only photographic works, and historians seldom identify Jackson with the work which makes up the majority of his oeuvre. He turned at mid-career from photography in this mode to a new role as a company man and director of the Detroit Publishing Company, the great behemoth of turn of the century American postcard publishing. His long, busy and productive life in photography encompasses many of the key issues in the history of that medium during the decades during which it came of age as a cultural force.

Born and raised in New England, Jackson studied art and found work as a re-toucher in Vermont photographic studios. Thus, although exposed to photography in his early years, he approached the medium as a painter whose responsibility it was to alter photographic details when aesthetics and decorum so required. He continued to paint Western landscape scenes competently from memory throughout his life. When he traveled West in 1866 as a young man in search of adventure, he found hard work, low pay, dramatic landscapes, and thriving markets for photography. Giving up his grueling cowboy life, he established a commercial photo studio in Omaha in 1867. By 1869, he was traveling the route of the Union Pacific railroad, making images both for travelers along the way and for stay-at-home audiences in the East. The following year, Francis Vandiveer Hayden hired him to photograph with the U.S. Geological and Geographical Survey, a relationship which continued during the Survey seasons of 1870-1879. Many of these photographs, as well as later works by Jackson, became known to the public through their translation into the medium of wood engraving, then more readily reproducible in the pages of newspapers and magazines. During the opening years of this period, Hayden's team explored what is today Yellowstone National Park. Following the Survey years, Jackson returned to railroad work and studio photography until he moved to Detroit to undertake his postcard work in 1897.


During the 1970s, as photography came to be widely institutionalized by the art historical establishment, Jackson was among the many early documentary photographers who came to be appropriated as fine art auteurs. Weston Naef, one of the first scholars to explore the work of the great Western landscape photographers, revealed this process of sometimes contradictory construction of the artist from the commercial photographer when he wrote in 1975 that "Jackson's photographs are also preserved in greater numbers than those of many others, since he was in commercial photography.. . The photographs themselves are, of course, the most important evidence of a camera artist's career " (emphases added).' Jackson's work, however, has been less subject to this process of reconstruction than that of many of his peers among photographers of the American West. Because he lived long enough to tell his own story in the early years of the twentieth century, he was less forgotten-and therefore less in need of rediscovery than photographers like Timothy O'Sullivan and Carleton Watkins. In fact, Jackson proved to be less easily assimilable to art history than were they. He was too much an old-timer and cowboy figure, and too astute a businessman to fit neatly into the now increasingly familiar model of rediscovery of photographers as lost proto-modernist heroes of their medium, artists in all but name, who had worked for the greater good of photography itself, rather than for fame or profit. This model typically assumes a landscape aesthetic based on the sublime grandeur of America's most dramatic terrain ambitiously pictured in an idiom largely derived from painting.

By making sublime photographs of sublime landscapes, these photographers could be seen as aligning themselves with fine art practices and audiences in a way that postcard view makers could not be understood to do as readily. Postcard imagery descends more directly from the modest and intimate tradition of picturesque views rather than from the heroic mode of Hudson River School-type landscape painting. Perhaps in part for this reason, to the extent that Jackson's work has been assimi- lated to art history, his postcards have accorded poorly with the dignity of the artistic station to which he has been called. His own autobiography readily indicates that he normally saw himself as a maker of factual views and an adventurer, more than as an artist. Where should such a figure stand in the history of photography? Is it possible that his enormous postcard production affords interpretive cues which make better sense of his varied endeavors than does his earlier more "artistic" work? And how do the images of his grand early exploratory landscapes change when they are reduced in scale and domesticated as postcards?


"Postcard sublime," the phrase I've used in my title, has some of the oxyrnoronic charm of a phrase like "pocket Hercules," but in Jackson's work, we see not just the reduction of a grand sublime landscape theme to a comfortably diminutive size, but also the flowering of the postcard form into its grandest and most compelling expression. The sublimity of the postcard genre's imaging of the world is necessarily a collective phenomenon pertaining to postcards assembled in quantities, rather than a quality residing in individual cards.

During the 1930s, Jackson first found his place in the early formations of the photographic canon. At this moment of simultaneous disillusionment with the myths of the West and nostalgia about the vanished frontier, he entered the history of photography as a "picture-maker of the old West". His son so titled a book about his father's life and work, which momentously closed with this passage:

In his pictures the pioneer age would have an immortality.. . Where else could future generations see the wild majesty of the Western land; the grim faces of its aboriginals, free and proud in their own country; the thrust outward of restless white men by road and rail from the Mississippi to the Pacific? High and far, from the canyon rim and mountain top, his camera looked out on the west.*

Jackson indubitably was a photographer participating in the ideology of manifest destiny, and his images capture well the sensibility of his son's text. But (a protean figure) he was also a Babbitt-like corporate man, fond of fast cars and golf clubs, living in a settled West, in fact a suburban Mid-West far less exotic to us today than the empty wilderness of his early photographs. Such longevity in a time of turbulent historic change can afford an individual many perspectives on the world. This is amply apparent in Jackson's progression from cowboy and mountain man/ photographer to corporate image publisher/photographer. In 1896, prosperous Detroit businessman William Livingstone offered to purchase Jackson's stock of 20,000 negatives, and to hire him as a director of the publishing company that had just acquired U.S. rights to a sophisticated color photolithography process developed in Switzerland, and known as Photochrom.

Jackson had amassed his inventory of images during successful careers as a government survey photographer on geological and geographical expeditions, as a publicist for the railroads, and through his own enterprise of capturing Western landscape scenes and Native American portraits for sale to growing audiences near and far. He had also frequently purchased desirable images from other photographers for sale under his own name. Jackson's transmission of this image stock to the Detroit Publishing


Company, and his acceptance of a position within the firm, indicate a dedication to the mass distribution of images which is an extension of his earlier entrepreneurial practices rather than a volte face. Jackson opined that what Livingstone was really purchasing from him was both "the most complete set of Western negatives yet assembled by one man, and my experience and reputation."3 His life's work to date, originally conceived as large monochrome prints, was thus to be reformatted very differently as colored photographic postcards, and also as enlargements suitable for framing, both distributed in enormous number. In addition to the existing images that he sold to the Detroit Company, he also provided thousands of new images for it following a series of extended photographic tours throughout the first decade of the twentieth century.

Jackson's reputation in the history of photography is based upon his work of the 1860s, 70s and 80s, decades before the arrival of the postcard form. His work for the Detroit Publishing Company, which in some sense is the culmination of his career as a professional image-maker, is not typically considered an important chapter in the history of the medium. In part, this results from art historfs tendency to privilege the unique above the multiple, or in this case, the limited edition multiple above the mass produced one. Yet in just the same years when the unheralded Detroit Publishing Company promoted the dissemination of his photographic images through photo-mechanical reproduction, other photo-mechanical reproductions of photographic images were playing a central role in the establishment of fine art photography as a legitimate practice.

Alfred Stieglitz (the paradigmatic arbiter of fine art photography and a key figure in all histories of photography), centered his polemics around the technically superb, aesthetically ambitious photogravure reproductions of great photographs published in his magazine, Camera Work. These were reproductions not unlike the Detroit Publishing Company's Photochroms in nature, but utterly unlike them in style, aspira- tion and status. In these two cases, photo-mechanical reproduction is turned to utterly opposite ends-with Stieglitz, the "reproduced" image ultimately becomes a kind of original in its own right, whereas with Jackson's postcards, the original photograph comes to be seen as a transparent reproduction of the real world, which in turn is reproduced by the postcard. That is, while Stieglitz's gravures at once attained fine art status in their own right and disseminated celebrated photographic images, many of Jackson's prints of the 1870s seem to exist primarily as reproductions of their subject matter, which later became tools for the


generation of cheap multiples: the postcards. Both images and modes of production can be written out of and into art history; the Camera Work gravures are central to the history of photography, while the Detroit Company cards are presently barely known.4

Commenting on the increasing use of photographic illustration in all kinds of popular publications, Jackson noted that:

As the process of half-tone engraving improved, not only did magazine pictures cut into the old "view" market, but cheap (and increasingly excellent) reproductions, in color as well as black- and-white, further lowered the demand for photo-prints. The latter had to be made one at a time, while photo-engravings could be turned out by the thousand.'

While Alfred Stieglitz's painstaking renderings of direct photographic prints as photogravure resulted in limited editions which paradoxically positioned the gravures as originals, the Detroit Publishing Company's translation of often well-known photographic images into enormously mass-produced form reversed the hierarchy and resulted in democratic multiples. Yet sophisticated craftsmanship played a great role in the production of these postcards, and their marketing often emphasized a relation to the fine arts. Both as reproductions of paintings and other fine art works, and as direct photographic images of the world, these postcards aspired to some of the prestige of fine art while claiming the indexical authority of the photograph. An advertisement for the Photochrom process announced it to be:

. . .the only successful means yet known of producing directly a photograph in the colors of nature. The results combine the truthfulness of a photograph with the color and richness of an oil painting or the delicate tinting of the most exquisite water color.6

The now-lost Photochrom process is one of continuous tone color rendition of monochrome photographic images using multiple impressions from lithographic stones to simulate full color photography. It employs separate stones for magenta, cyan, yellow and black image layers, which are printed in perfect registration to superimpose the colors. Approximately 200 impressions per hour could be made; the stones were apt to wear out after 5,000 or so impressions. Tom Southall has noted that Photochrom prints seem " 'lifelike' because they reintroduce the colors of the world back into the abstraction of a black-and-white image," but they also have elements of artifice, as those tints lack the indexicality of the monochrome photographic image. Photochrom readily allows the interpolation not only of hues chosen at will but also of hand-drawn objects--or the removal of unwanted element^.^ Such changes were inevitable as Photochrom color plates wore out and

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needed to be re-surfaced, but other variations may represent purely aesthetic motivations as well.

The Detroit Publishing Company postcards incorporating photographs taken by Jackson fall into several different categories, including the presen- tation of earlier photographs in postcard formats, the transformation of earlier photographs for postcard formats, the generation of new photographs of previously photographed subjects for postcards, and the generation of new photographs of new subjects for postcards. The variations apparent between postcards derived from the same negative assume many forms. These include: image cropping to fit the postcard format, vignetting of image because of damaged edges or simply for visual effect, lateral reversals of images, alterations in the color of specific passages, and the addition or deletion of visual information (Figure 1, Color Plate V; Figure 2 and Figure 3, Color Plate VI). Skies might be

Figure I . Color Plate V William Hen ry Jackson, attrib., Pike's Peak, from the Garden of the Gods, Colorado, 3 postcards, Detroit Publishing Company 5283. (Collection of the New York Public Library, Department of Photographs, Leonard Lnuder Collection)


Figure 2. William Henry lackson, attrib., Balanced Rock, Garden of the Gods, Colorado, 2 postcards, Detroit Publishing Company 5612. (Collection of the New York Public Library, Department of Photographs, Leonard h u d w Collection)

Figure 3. Color Plate VI. William Henry lackson, attrib., Grand Canyon of the Arizona from O'NeillS Point, 4 postcards, Detroit Publishing Company 6322. (Collection of the New York Public Library, Department of Photographs, Leonard h u d e r Collection)

added or altered, rock faces might be differently illuminated, shaded or detailed. Bodies of water also frequently underwent changes in rendering, and plants, trees and flowers appear and disappear. It is normally not possible to tell from visual analysis who made such changes or why. It is


very likely that Jackson did not initiate or supervise all changes in the successive printings of his images, and it is impossible to tell which variant image comes closest to what he saw at the time the negative was exposed.

This element of subjectivity and manual intervention in the Photochrom process was just one aspect of the reinterpretation of Jackson's earlier images as postcards. In some images, little cropping or alteration of the image occurred, whereas in others, drastic reformatting was necessary to accommodate differences in proportion and aspect ratio between postcards and the original photographs, which were often broader than the relatively narrow postcard format. A comparison of Jackson's famous 1873 photograph of the Mountain of the Holy Cross with three of the several Detroit Publishing Company postcards derived from it suggests some of the transformations which could occur in this reformula- tion of a popular image (Figures 4,5 and 6). Jackson's postcards were also sometimes made from new negatives produced at sites he had first visited with a camera twenty years before. His several views of the Balanced Rock in the Garden of the Gods in Colorado help us track the changing fortunes of once remote landscapes which had become celebrated tourist

Figure 4 . William Henry lackson, Mountain of the Holy Cross, Colorado, 1873, albumen silver print from glass negative, 9 518 x 13 114". (Collection of the 1. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles)


Figure 5. William Henry ]ackson, attrib., Mountain of the Holy Cross, Colorado, postcard, Detroit Publishing Company 6756. (Collection of the New York Public Library, Department of Photographs, Leonard Lnuder Collection)

Figure 6 . William Henry lackson, attrib., Mountain of the Holy Cross, Colorado, 2 postcards, Detroit Publishing Company 5614. (Collection of the N t w York Public Library, Department of Photographs, Leonard Lnuder Collection)


Figure 7 . Willinm Henry lackson, attrib., Stenmboat Rock and Balanced Rock, Garden of the Gods, Colorado, postcard, Detroit Publishing Company 12225. (Collection of the New York Public Library, Department of Photographs, Leonard Lauder Collection)

sites in part because of the broad dissemination of their images in early photographs (Figures 2 and 7).

A comparison of a postcard adapted from a photograph of the 1870s with an image of around 1900 reveals that the once "undiscovered site has become a well-known and popular tourist destination, complete with guard rails. Collating the immensely numerous and often quite subtle changes between different postcard printings of the same image would be an immense undertaking, and such a detailed inventory is beyond the scope of the present study. While many of the changes between editions of a given postcard are difficult to pinpoint exactly, others are very evident, as for instance in Canyon Diablo, Arizona, where the number of train cars perched on the trestle bridge differ from card to card; in each case, they are largely the work of retouching during the Photochrom process, which allowed the engine to pull eight cars as readily as it did three (Figure 8).

In 1938, the Museum of Modern Art presented an exhibition of nineteenth-century Western landscape photographs organized by photographer Ansel Adams. A story recounts Jackson's comments upon being guided through the exhibition in a wheelchair. Pointing at a large, handsome work, he said:

"That's a pretty good picture, Mr. Adams. Who took it?"Adams answered.. .] "You did." Jackson mused, then said: "Why, so I did. But I can do better now, and in color with this. . ." [and pulled out a snapshot camera from his pocket]. . .'


Figure 8. William Henry Jackson, attrib., Canyon Diablo, Arizona, 2 postcards, Detroit Publishing Company 5506. (Collection of the Neul York Public Library, Department of Photogrnphs, Leonard Lauder Collection)

This story speaks of changes in photographic technology, but also hints at the often vexed questions of attribution associated with Jackson's production. His frequent practice of buying other photographers' negatives for use under his own imprint was commercially logical but is today problematic for connoisseurs. Typical of nineteenth-century studio photographers around the world, this practice bespeaks an understanding of their role as that of entrepreneurs and distributors of images rather than (or in addition to) that of makers of pictures. Those landscape photographers specializing in remote terrains and elusive subjects, such as the American West and its indigenous peoples, were perhaps particularly likely to sell or exchange negatives. Jackson bought other photographers' inventories throughout his career; thus have other photographers' works entered the history of photography as images '%y" Jackson. Just as other photographers'work had been folded into the Jackson oeuvre during the 1860s, 70s and 80s' so was his own work subsumed into the corporate identity of the Detroit Publishing


Company. Some contributors of images, however, were increasingly insis- tent upon the recognition of their authorship. A number of Karl Moon's portraits of Native Americans, for instance, joined the Detroit Company's stock during the Jackson years, and are prominently credited to their maker.9 Perhaps that work that Jackson asked about as a man of 95 at the museum opening was one he'd acquired rather than photographed himself. This is a story not so much about the "death of the author" argued by contemporary cultural critics as one about the very long life of the author, a rare man of the frontier generation who lived on into the 1930s to be honored and credited not only with his own accomplishments and qualities but with those of the era which he had come to represent. So does history operate in terms of synecdoche.

Although Jackson's intent in making (and acquiring) his inventory of landscape views presumably varied according to the audience for which the images were intended, his images were recycled and given new con- texts. Those made for a geographical survey might later serve as popular decorations or entertainments, and the Detroit Publishing Company postcards are but the ultimate phase in the chain of image translations and adaptations which encompassed albumen silver prints from glass negatives in various sizes, stereopticon views, wood engravings adapted from photographs for newspaper and magazine publication, and other formats. As negatives of the 1870s were reinterpreted as postcards forty years later, images created for the albums of prints on the parlor tables of middle class viewers back East, or for government files, were sent into action as postcards, and then literally inscribed with messages by their users. Today, many turn of the century postcards have become what we sometimes call "collectibles"; they were produced as consumable, disposable, exchangeable, and inscribable objects quite different in nature from the larger and more fragile albumen prints we identify as fine art works, and which were normally cherished in albums rather than being exchanged in this way. I differ from Peter Hales, the most thoughtful scholar of Jackson's work to date, who has argued that such inscriptions threatened and diminished the power of the image because, as he puts it "the words the purchaser wrote there became the message, supplanting, countering or in other respects altering the information-bearing power of the visual image.'"'

Texts inscribed upon postcards sometimes say unexpected things: not only versions of 'We came here and saw this place, which looks just as it does in the postcard' but rather 'We hope to see this tomorrow.' To take but a specific example, the Detroit card entitled Apache Warriors, which


exists within the collection of the New York Public Library, is neatly and cryptically inscribed on its face "The Indians we did not see"." This inscription identifies the postcard image as a didactic indication of an experience one should have, or should have had, rather than as a prefab- ricated memory of the viewer's experiences, or a reification of the ephemeral. This normative function of the postcard image and its oblique relationship to texts inscribed on it by the purchaser, enriches the history of these objects, and emphasizes the complex transactional relation of image, maker, and audiences. Postcards make pleasingly literal the trope of the 'inscription of meanings' upon images.

Inscriptions upon postcards are an effective reminder of the powerful alliances of image and text. The textual component of many photographs, and their status as information rather than fine art both help to explain their prevalence in library rather than museum collections. A monumental public assemblage of Detroit Publishing Company postcards is to be found in the Leonard H. Lauder postcard collection of the New York Public Library. The Lauder collection is organized around the output of the Detroit Publishing Company rather than around any individual's authorial production of cards as fine art works. So within this collection, we can find Jackson only through the products of the commercial firm he joined and came to represent. The very nature and logic of the postcard industry itself determined that publishers would be seen as the significant entities rather than the image-makers they employed. In this apparently author-less realm of encyclopedic picturing of the world lies the grandest, the most sublime aspect of the postcard idea.

In his story "The Library of Babel," the writer Borges suggested that assemblages of texts and of information are in effect the world-or at any rate reasonable facsimiles. He wrote:

When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. . . . The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope.I2

His vision of the library as universal repository of meaning applies even better to a library of images, or one-like the New York Public-which contains enormous image collections, such as the Lauder Collection, in itself a kind of microcosmic recapitulation of the world through pictures, a containment, ordering and possession of the vast, multifarious, intricate, diverse messiness of the world at large. This is really the significance of the Detroit Publishing Company endeavor: imperialism and possession, consumption and experience, reduction and exchange, reification and


vicarious experience, tourism and inscription, the formulaic reduction of experience to stereotype and the individual redemption of experience through textual commentary all are implicit in postcard imaging and collection.

Susan Sontag famously wrote of photography that "The camera is the idealization of consciousness in its acquisitive mood" and "To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed."'3 As a commentary on this, she invokes Jean Luc Godard's Les Carabiniers (1963) in which two peasant recruits to the Army travel the world and bring home only postcards, symbols of mastery and ownership of the world, metaphors for their conquest of experience. But she also observed that "Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging," among their many possible packages, the postcard is one affording many meanings and uses. Jackson was thus packaging his own earlier photographs when he arranged for them to be issued as postcards in Detroit, and thanks to the Photochrom process he was able to make them "better now, and in color."

Postcards were corollaries of the development of tourism, tending toward the domestication of the exotic, and toward the equating of the distant or remarkable with the familiar and local. But they were also heirs to the grand, exotic travel views of an earlier photographic era, in which audiences imaginatively traveled through pictures to remote lands. The Detroit Publishing Company packaged the world through its enormous postcard production, creating a reversal of effect from that previous era. Now it was no longer the image itself that was sublime, but rather its participation in a vast system of images containing, possessing and encompassing the world, making it exchangeable, distribu- table, grand and awesome: postcard sublime.

NOTES

I would like to thank Jordana Mendelson for her broad vision of postcards and their sigruficance and for her work in developing the College Art Association panel where this paper had its birth, as well as for her encouragement and patience during its development in the present form. I would also like to thank Julia Van Haaften, Sharon Frost and Elizabeth Wyckoff of the New York Public Library for their generosity, research assistance and knowl- edge. Lindsey Stowe-Berns provided valuable assistance in organizing copy photographs and permissions for reproduction.

1. Weston Naef, Era of Exploration (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1975),219. 2. Clarence S. Jackson, Picture Maker of the Old West, William H . Iackson (New York:

Charles Scribner's Sons, 1947), 302. 3. William Henry Jackson, Time Exposure, 1940 (Albuquerque: University of

New Mexico Press, 19861, 323.


4. Space does not permit the reproduction of a Camera Work photogravure here for comparison, but these are well-known and widely reproduced in books on Stieglitz's own work, on the pictorialist movement in photography, and in compendia and reprint editions of Camera Work images.

5. Jackson, 320. 6. Jim Hughes, The Birth of a Century: Early Color Photographs of America (London:

Tauris Parke Books, 1994), 8. 7. Thomas W. Southall, "'In the Colors of Nature': Detroit Publishing Company

Photochroms," in Kathleen Stewart Howe, ed., Intersections: Lithography, Photography and the Traditions of Photography (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 68.

8. Douglas Waitley, William Henry Jackson, Framing the Frontier (Missoula MT: Mountain Press Publishing Company, 1998), 197, quoting from Beaumont Newhall and Diana Edkins, William H. Jackson (Fort Worth: Morgan and Morgan, 1974).

9. Karl Moon, Navaho Boy, Detroit Publishing Company 10935. Karl Moon and Co. is prominently credited on the face of the card.

10. Peter B. Hales, William Henry Jackson and the Transformation of the American Landscape (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 262.

11. William Henry Jackson, attrib., Apache Warriors, Detroit Publishing Company 6242. Space does not permit the reproduction of this card here. The inscription ("The Indians we did not see.") runs vertically from the card's lower right to its upper right along the right- hand edge, recto.

12. Jorge Luis Borges, 'The Library of Babel," in Labyrinths, transl. by James E. Irby, ed. by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1962), 54-55.

13. Susan Sontag, O n Photography (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1973), 4.

postcard sublime: william henry jackson's western landscapes

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