WILLIAM HENRY JACKSON Teton Range And Jackson Lake, 1872 Albumen Print 9.6x12.6" ASG# WHJ/3511 on larger mount

Famous early photographs of the Grand Tetons, Wyoming during the Hayden Survey.

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 aided in its becoming 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. In the mid 1880s he entered into a distribution agreement with Chain and Hardy in Denver.

Fair to Good. Tones 5 on a scale of 10. Mild wear. 2 small ink spots visible in sky area