DETROIT PHOTOGRAPHIC CO. Hacienda Temasopa, Mexico., 1882-92. 16.8x23.6" photochrom print, mounted on 26.5x22.9" heavy dark grey board, window matte mounted to print and backing board. Printed 1905. Printed in white ink on mount recto: 01595. HACIENDA TEMASOPA. MEXICO. / DETROIT PHOTOGRAPHIC CO.; Inscribed in grey pencil on window mat recto: 1991.475. Inscribed in grey pencil on mount verso: WJM/008 [slash through] / DPC/2656.

William Henry Jackson (1843-1942) trained as an illustrator and painter before picking up the camera shortly after the Civil War. He worked as a bullwhacker before setting up his first photography studio in Omaha. By 1867 he was taking pictures of the local Pawnee Indians. In 1869 he was taking landscape views along the route of the Union Pacific Railroad. The scientist and Geologic Survey leader, F.V. Hayden, met Jackson at this time and hired him to be the official photographer of the Hayden survey. Jackson's photographs of Yellowstone from the early 1870s helped it to become the nation's first National Park. In 1879, his work for the Hayden survey ended and he opened a studio in Denver. Jackson's landscape/railroad work made in Colorado for the railroad companies was the primary source of the views he distributed from his Denver studio in the 1880s. By then Jackson had become the most famous photographer in America and, like Carleton Watkins and Eadward Muybridge, one of a handful of artists who used mammoth plate negatives.

From his origins as an illustrator Jackson liked color and often hand painted his albumen prints in the 19th century. Jackson's photographic business in Denver was the most successful photographic enterprise in the West during the 1880s and 1890s, except for the Haynes Yellowstone franchise. His next enterprise was the Detroit Photographic Company, which made and distributed photographically generated color views printed like lithographs from stones called Photochroms. Using older and recent photographs he would make separations on sensitized stones, usually taking 5-9 stones per print. From 1900 to 1920 the company made and distributed tens of millions of postcards and larger color prints. The company closed in bankruptcy in the mid-1920s.

Good. Foxing in top right section of sky. Corner wear on outer corner and top center edge of mat.