DETROIT PHOTOGRAPHIC PUBLISHING COMPANY. 01961. Temple Gate Islands Lake Superior Wisconsin, 1898 Hand Colored Gelatin Silver Print 19.75x16.7"ASG# DPC/2654 title and copyright 1898 Detroit Pub. in negative. Mounted on 25.5x22" black paper on linen.

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. 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.

Detroit Photographic Company. 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. His next enterprise was the Detroit Photographic Company that made and distributed photographically generated color views printed like lithographs off stones the prints were called Photocroms. Using older and recent photographs he would make separations on sensitized stones usually 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.

Very Good. Minor wear, handling marks