1. The passage quoted is from Holmes, O. W., “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” Atlantic Monthly 3 (1859): 738–48Google Scholar. See also “Sun Painting and Sun Sculpture,” Atlantic Monthly 8 (1861): 13–29Google Scholar; and “Doings of the Sunbeam,” Atlantic Monthly 12 (1863): 1–18.Google Scholar

2. In my view, the distinction between documentary and nondocumentary is ineffective when applied to a characterization of pictures, at least for 19thcentury photography. I prefer talking about documentary use and documentary practice, that is, about procedures for processing information. Snyder, Joel, in The Documentary Photograph as a Work of Art (Chicago, 1976)Google Scholar, holds a different position. A few recent essays amply demonstrate the necessity of taking into account the entire documentary system surrounding the pictures to understand their functions. See Sekula, Allan, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (1986): 3–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar, on the imaging of the “criminal” and of racial characters in 19th-century statistical anthropology; Lyman, Christopher, The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions (Washington, D.C., 1982)Google Scholar, though I would disagree with his interpretation; Didi-Huberman, Georges, Invention de I'Hysterie (Paris, 1982)Google Scholar; and Krauss, Rosalind, “Photography's Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View,” Art Journal 42 (1982): 311–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the critique of museographic recomposition of the history of photography, see especially the brilliant essays of Sekula, Allan (Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo-Works, 1973–1983 [Halifax, 1984])Google Scholar and Phillips, Christopher (“The Judgment Seat of Photography,” October 22 [1982]: 27–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “A Mnemonic Art? Calotype Aesthetics at Princeton,” October 26 [1983]: 35–62)Google Scholar; the present essay owes much to both of these authors.

3. Jackson is treated in the standard critical work: Naef, Weston and Wood, James, Era of Exploitation (Boston, 1975), pp. 219–250Google Scholar. But he has not received an aesthetic canonization like Timothy H. O'Sullivan, to whose work his is sometimes negatively contrasted (for example, as an instance of the merely “beautiful,” as opposed to the “sublime” attributed to O'Sullivan, according to Jussim, Estelle and Lindquist-Cock, Elizabeth, Landscape as Photograph [New Haven, 1985], pp. 27, 53)Google Scholar. The basic monograph had been that of Newhall, Beaumont and Edkins, Diana E. (William H. Jackson [Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., 1971])Google Scholar, until the publication of Hales, Peter B.'s William Henry Jackson and the Transformation of the American Landscape, (Philadelphia, 1988)Google Scholar, which, as mentioned before, could not be taken into acount here. Jackson's classic autobiography, Time Exposure (1940)Google Scholar, and the introduction by Ferenc M. Szasz to the recent reprint (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986, pp. xi–xxi), are particularly useful. See other bibliographical references below.

4. Jackson was a meticulous diarist; see LeRoy, and Hafen, Ann, eds., The Diaries of William Henry Jackson, the Far West and the Rockies Historical Series 1820–1875 (Glendale, Calif., 1959), vol. 10Google Scholar. He used his diaries in a number of historical publications (see note 37). Fascinated by the work of the painter Thomas Moran, his colleague on the Hayden survey, he seemed, from an artistic perspective, to value photography less than drawing and watercolor, to which he devoted the latter part of his life. See Driggs, Howard R., The Old West Speaks (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1956)Google Scholar; Jackson, Clarence S., Pageant of the Pioneers: The Veritable Art of William H. Jackson, “Picture Maker of the Old West” (Minden, Neb., 1958).Google Scholar

5. This claim was made by Jackson himself, who described in detail, and not without some embarrassment, his transactions with rail barons, especially the inevitable Jay Gould (“Gould's name reeked; but he was king”; see Jackson, , Time Exposure, pp. 252–55Google Scholar). Hayden himself had been connected with the Northern Pacific Railroad consortium since 1871. The official railroad photographer, however, was F. J. Haynes; see Tilden, Freeman, Northern Pacific Views: The Railroad Photography of F. Jay Haynes 1876–1905 (Seattle, 1983).Google Scholar

6. As shown by numerous examples of commercial catalogues, which, while predating Jackson's, do not match the latter's scope or descriptive ambition; see, for instance, Gems of California Scenery: Catalogue of Views Photographed and Published by Lawrence & Houseworth (San Francisco, 1865)Google Scholar (p. 5: “we are constantly adding new views to our list, and trust that they will be sufficiently meritorious to ensure a large sale both at home and abroad”). Darrah, William C., in The World of Stereographs (Gettysburg, 1977)Google Scholar, gives numerous examples of archival practices (numbering, captioning, serializing, and so on) generated by the mass production of stereographs in the large publishing houses.

7. The competition of the great surveys has been recounted by Stegner, Wallace, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (Boston, 1954)Google Scholar; Bartlett, Richard A., Great Surveys of the American West (Norman, Okla., 1962)Google Scholar; and Goetzmann, William H., Exploration and Empire (New York, 1966), esp. pp. 603–48Google Scholar. Goetzmann wrote that “the various surveys vied with one another in these lavish photographic productions for propaganda purposes” (p. 479). See also Trachtenberg, Alan, The Incorporation of America (New York, 1982), pp. 19–20Google Scholar. Finally, Alan Trachtenberg's recent collection of essays, Reading American Photographs (New York, 1989)Google Scholar, contains a previously unpublished essay on survey photography (“Naming the View,” pp. 119–63Google Scholar) which is both remarkably penetrating and richly documented.

8. There are, however, examples of at least attempts at systematic organization of photographs in scientific institutions before 1870, particularly relating to ethnographic collections amassed through “delegation photography” in the 1850s and 1860s. The so-called Shindler Catalogue (Smithsonian Institution, 1869)Google Scholar is a case in point (Fleming, Paula R. and Luskey, Judith, The North American Indians in Early Photographs [New York, 1986], p. 24Google Scholar). Some university institutes (like Asa Gray's botanical library at Harvard) and other picture repositories (like the Army Medical Museum in Washington, D. C.) might reveal more. Among Jackson's catalogues, I shall only quote the following: Descriptive Catalogue of the Photographs … for the Years 1869 to 1873 (Washington, D.C., 1874)Google Scholar, quoted below as Catalogue 1874a, which includes an annex titled Catalogue of Photographs of Indians …( = Catalogue 1874b); Descriptive Catalogue of the Photographs … for the Years 1869 to 1875 (Washington, D.C., 1875; rept. Denver: U.S.G.S., 1978)Google Scholar (= Catalogue 1875); and Descriptive Catalogue of Photographs of North American Indians (Washington, D.C., 1877)Google Scholar (= Catalogue 1877).

9. The most expanded version of Hayden's ongoing apology of the “practical and scientific use” of Jackson's photographs may be found in his Ninth Annual Report … for 1875 (Washington, D.C., 1877), pp. 21–22Google Scholar. On the 1873–74 and 1877–78 congressional investigations, see Goetzmann, , Exploration, pp. 478–82, 577–601.Google Scholar

10. Jackson, , Catalogue 1874a [p. 3].Google Scholar

11. Jackson, , Time Exposure, p. 221.Google Scholar

12. This is inferred from Hayden Survey Records, Letters Received, Record Group 57, N.A.R.A.

13. Details of this transaction may be retraced through a series of letters sent by both Barlow and Heap to Hayden (Hayden Survey Records, Letters Received June 1871 to January 1872).

14. Goetzmann, (Exploration, p. 581)Google Scholar quotes letters written by geologist John S. Newberry in 1877, which, in defense of John W. Powell, brought against Hayden, among other signs of scientific misconduct, the charge of distributing photographs for political effect. In a scrapbook of newspaper clippings relating to the Western surveys, kept by another of Hayden's rivals, George M. Wheeler (preserved by the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley), one finds a number of items from the Sunday Capitol (ca. 1873–74) mocking Hayden's marketing practices; he was accused, for instance, of having, in early 1873, answered the request of a journalist for “Modoc lavabed pictures” (a site in Northern California made famous by the Modoc War) with falsely captioned pictures of the Snake River lavabeds in Idaho. As evidenced by his 1870 republication of A. J. Russel's Union Pacific views under the guise of geological exploration (Sun Pictures of Rocky Mountain Scenery [New York, 1870]Google Scholar), Hayden had been, even prior to meeting Jackson, a dexterous exploiter of the polyvalence of photographic images.

15. For the years 1871 to 1873, letters received by Hayden, requesting or acknowledging the receipt of photographs, came from Army officials, scientists (J. D. Dana, E. N. Horsford, B. Silliman, Jr., J. D. Whitney, G. Davidson, A. A. Agassiz, S. V. Baird, and many lesser-known figures), publishers (J. H. Goodsell and J. B. Stillman), railway officials and bankers (R. H. Lamborn, M. D. Cooke, and N. Stein), Congress members (A. B. Anthony, A. Caldwell, A. A. Sargent, and R. B. Roosevelt), and, at least once, from President Grant's Secretary (O. E. Babcock, January 22, 1873): Hayden Survey Records, Letters Received.

16. Jackson, , Catalogue 1874a, pp. 6–7Google Scholar. This passage refers to views made on the railroad line in 1869.

17. Jackson, , Catalogue 1874a [p. 3].Google Scholar

18. See Hayden, , Sixth Annual Report (Washington, D.C., 1873), pp. 6, 32, 35Google Scholar; Seventh Annual Report (Washington, D.C., 1874), pp. 2, 7, 62Google Scholar; Eighth Annual Report (Washington, D.C., 1876), pp. 11–12Google Scholar; and Twelfth Annual Report (Washington, D.C., 1883), pp. xv–xvi.Google Scholar

19. See Fleming, and Luskey, , North American Indians, pp. 23–24, 106–10Google Scholar. This deserves further study.

20. See Sekula, , “The Body and the Archive,”Google Scholar for illuminating remarks on Francis Galton's epistemology and his method of composite photography.

21. Hayden also commented on the hardships of getting “any reliable statistics of individuals or bands.” The quotes are from Jackson, , Catalogue 1877, p. iii [v] and 1874b [p. 69].Google Scholar

22. See Lyman, , Vanishing RaceGoogle Scholar; and Fleming, and Luskey, , North American IndiansGoogle Scholar. It is known that a number of the Hayden-Blackmore photographs were obtained during “delegation” visits to Washington, where it was customary to dress the Indians up in war costume. But criticizing, in the name of “documentary” truth, the artificiality of 19th-century photography of Indians is less crucial than (a) situating such artificiality in the ideological formation of 19th-century anthropology (see Blackman, Margaret B., “Posing the American Indian,” Natural History 89 [1980]: 69–74Google Scholar); and (b) identifying the historical functions of the archival mechanism itself.

23. Jackson, , Catalogue 1877, p. iiiGoogle Scholar; the previous quote is from Catalogue 1874b [p. 69].

24. See Fleming, and Luskey, , North American Indians, pp. 20–43, 70–101Google Scholar. Indeed, Jackson was one of several frontier photographers who, in taking pictures in and around reservations, not only directly experienced Indian hostility but evidently, though not always admittedly, understood that its nature was more political than cultural (see his oft-recounted story of his 1874 visit to the Los Pinos agency [Time Exposure, pp. 224–28]).Google Scholar

25. In 1873, for example, a European ethnographer ordered Indian pictures, adding specific requirements: “photographs from nature […] the subjects to be either naked or adorned only in their war costumes or natives leggings &c,” in “profile and ‘en face’ representations,” “each specimen […] accompanied by a statement of the tribe and its location and other available notes” (Carl Doerflinger to Hayden, Hayden Survey Records, Letters Received, January 5 and 30, 1873). After the catalogue was published, various French anthropological societies ordered the collection.

26. He wrote, for instance, that in photographs, “attitudes, dresses, features, hands, feet, betray the social grade …,” “mediocrity shows itself for what it is worth”; and that pictures allow the viewer to study “the family likeness that shows itself throughout a whole wide connection,” “the effects of age upon the features,” “the laws of physical degeneration,” “the effect of character in moulding the features” (showing the experienced police officers “the expression of habitual crime”), and so on (“Doings of the Sunbeam,” pp. 9–14Google Scholar). Incidentally, I would argue that Holmes cared less to identify with the panopticist passion than to voice it.

27. Hayden's records include extensive lists of European academic correspondents. In Paris, the archivist and press professional James Jackson assembled a large collection for the Société de Géographie (see the Society's bulletin, Acta Geographica 52–53 [1982–1983]: 41–44).Google Scholar

28. Rogers, G. F., Malde, H. E., and Turner, R. M., Bibliography of Repeat Photography for Evaluating Landscape Change (Salt Lake City, 1984)Google Scholar, explain general principles of their methods and show several pairs based on Jackson pictures.

29. See Sekula, Allan, “Photography Between Labour and Capital,” in Mining Photographs and Other Pictures (Halifax, 1983), pp. 226–32.Google Scholar

30. On the National Park idea and the Yellowstone bill, see especially Huth, Hans, “Yosemite: the Story of an Idea,” Sierra Club Bulletin 33 (1948): 47–78Google Scholar; Runte, Alfred, National Parks: The American Experience (Lincoln, Neb., 1979)Google Scholar; Bartlett, Robert A., Nature's Yellowstone (Albuquerque, N.M., 1974), esp. ch. 9Google Scholar; and Nash, Roderick, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, 1982), esp. chs. 6–8Google Scholar. On the case for Jackson's photographs' persuasive role, see, for instance, Taft, Robert, Photography and the American Scene (New York, 1964 [Dover rept.]), pp. 299–302.Google Scholar

31. The case against the “Jackson tale” is powerfully made by Bossen, Howard, “A Tall Tale Retold: The Influence of the Photographs of William Henry Jackson on the Passage of the Yellowstone Park Act of 1872,” Studies in Visual Communication 8 (1982): 98–109CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who also reviews the history of the tale; his point, in my opinion, is somewhat weakened by his eagerness to underscore the role of verbal (versus visual) argumentation. While Clarence Jackson did much to strengthen the myth, his father was in fact rather evasive on the role of his pictures (Jackson, , Time Exposure, pp. 196–197, 205Google Scholar). Hayden's letter files show that (a) general distribution of Yellowstone pictures reached a peak in early 1872 and (b) specific requests or acknowledgments from politicians were received between February 13 and March 30, while the Yellowstone bill was passed by Senate on January 30, and neither warrant nor dismiss the idea of “influence.”

32. A good example is Ansel Adams's use of his photographs to gain support from Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes toward the creation of Kings Canyon National Park in 1936–40. Secretary Ickes praised Adams's photographs and supported creation of the park, so “we can be sure that your descendants and mine will be able to take as beautiful pictures as you have taken.” On the role of his pictures, Adams wisely commented, “no one will ever know whether it was one percent or five percent, or whether it was entirely imaginary” (quoted in Turnage, Robert, Ansel Adams: The Role of the Artist in the Environmental Movement [Wilderness Society, n.d.], n.p.).Google Scholar

33. Robert Bartlett makes a powerful argument in this direction in Nature's Yellowstone (pp. 199–208), mentioning also the role of Jackson's photographs. Hayden Survey records contain at least one letter from M. D. Cooke, President of First National Bank, requesting Yellowstone views for a Northern Pacific investor (Letters Received, January 22, 1873).

34. Jackson, , Time Exposure, p. 201.Google Scholar

35. As abundantly shown by Jackson's account (Time Exposure, pp. 204–18Google Scholar), Longfellow's famous poem (written in 1879), Taft's characterization of the picture as “historic” (Photography, p. 302Google Scholar) and Jackson, C. S.'s Quest of the Snowy Cross (Denver, 1952)Google Scholar. See examples of contemporary reproductions of the photograph in Ostroff, Eugene, Western Views and Eastern Visions, (Washington, D.C., 1981), p. 49Google Scholar. The Holy Cross was turned into a national monument in 1929 and has been an emblem of Colorado's regional identity (Szasz, in Jackson, , Time Exposure, p. xv).Google Scholar

36. Joel Snyder reports this in American Frontiers (Millerton, N.Y., 1981, p. 37)Google Scholar to contrast the (naive) ideal of a benevolent nature, typified in his view by Jackson, to that of an awesome nature, which would be O'Sullivan's. Szasz argues from witnesses' accounts that such retouching is “unlikely” (Jackson, , Time Exposure, p. xx).Google Scholar

37. Jackson's numerous articles cannot be listed here; though not complete, the bibliography given by Newhall, and Edkins, (Jackson, pp. 152–53)Google Scholar gives a fair idea of his prolixity. To those books mentioned in notes 3, 4, and 35, one may add Jackson, W. H. and Driggs, H. R., The Pioneer Photographer (Yonkers-on-Hudson, N.Y., 1929)Google Scholar; and Jackson, C. S., Picture Maker of the Old West: William H. Jackson (New York, 1947).Google Scholar

38. Edward Weston's Daybooks provide the model of the rhetorical aesthetics of 20th-century landscape photography. The neotranscendantalist correspondence between the “outward” and “inward” eyes is a major critical tool in much writing on photography (it was, for instance, the organizing principle of John Szarkowski's 1978 exhibit, Mirrors and Windows [New York, Museum of Modern Art]).

39. See Allan Sekula's, Christopher Phillips's, and Rosalind Krauss's essays quoted in note 2.

40. Jackson is often the only 19th-century Western photographer quoted in historical works and encyclopedias. For instances of critical devaluation of Jackson, see notes 3, 36, and 43. Weston Naef, while quoting Jackson, states that “the photographs themselves are, of course, the most important evidence of a camera artist's career” (Naef, and Wood, , Era, p. 219).Google Scholar

41. Jackson, W. H., “Photographing the Colorado Rockies Fifty Years Ago,” Colorado Magazine 3 (1926): 11Google Scholar; Jackson's use of the word “Kodakery” as the incipit of this article is obviously significant. Also see Jackson, and Driggs, , Pioneer, p. v.Google Scholar

42. Szasz, in Jackson, , Time Exposure, p. xviii.Google Scholar

43. In this essay, I have purposedly avoided the stylistic discussion of Jackson's pictures, which is, in my opinion, overdetermined by the various aspects of his career and personality discussed here. But critics have assessed the worth of Jackson's “oeuvre” within an apparently well-established hierarchy. Naef places the “crest,” the “maturity,” or the “zenith” of Jackson's photography between 1873 and 1875 and states that “his landscapes of the eighties are artistically dependent on the precedents Watkins and Muybridge set in the sixties and seventies” (Naef, and Wood, , pp. 224–26Google Scholar). What seems to be at stake here is rarefaction of the valorizable oeuvre; in recent years, Jackson's photographs put at auction have rarely been sold over five hundred dollars a piece, about ten times less than Watkins's six-thousand-dollar highs.