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Description: Images of the West: Survey Photography in French Collections, 1860–1880
~William Bell
(1830–1910)
Author
PublisherTerra Foundation for American Art
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Appendix: Biographies
William Bell (1830–1910)
Often confused with his contemporary William A. Bell, a doctor and photographer who also took part in an expedition to the West, William Bell is the great unknown among the exploration photographers. Born in Liverpool, England in 1830, he began his career as a photographer in Philadelphia around 1850. He participated in the Civil War as a member of a cavalry regiment. Beginning in 1863 he took photographs of wounds and mutilations that formed the core of the collection of the Army Medical Museum, becoming the museum’s chief photographer after the war. In 1867, while his namesake was taking part in a reconnaissance in the West on behalf of the Union Pacific Railroad, Bell purchased the studio of James E. McClees in Philadelphia. He may have been in the West as early as 1868. In 1872 he was hired as a photographer by George M. Wheeler to replace Timothy H. O’Sullivan, who had joined the King expedition. It is in the course of this survey, which focused primarily on Arizona, that he took numerous images of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River—often breathtaking vertical views—and a few portraits of Paiute Indians. In 1882 he joined an expedition to Patagonia to photograph the transit of the planet Venus. Although his photographic career was fairly modest, Bell left behind an important account of exploration photography, published in the Philadelphia Photographer in 1873. Since the 1970s, his work, which was long overshadowed by that of O’Sullivan, has been included in a growing number of exhibitions.
Alexander Gardner (1821–1882)
Born in Glasgow, Scotland, Gardner emigrated to the United States in 1856—having already trained as a journalist and photographer—and joined Mathew B. Brady’s studio in New York, for which he took celebrated portraits of Abraham Lincoln. Together with Brady he covered the Civil War but soon refused to allow his work to be published under Brady’s name and left him to create a competing firm with Timothy H. O’Sullivan. This dispute, which was one of the first concrete manifestations of the emergence of a copyright for photographs in the United States, led him to adopt a more direct reporting style, reflected in his famous Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the Civil War (1866). After the war he left for the West and in 1867 became the official photographer and propagandist for one of the branches of the Union Pacific Railway, which published several illustrated albums of his images. In 1868 he served as the official witness to the negotiations between the Plains Indians and the American government in Fort Laramie. Since the late 1850s he had also begun to photograph the Indian delegations on their visits to Washington, and in 1867 he resumed this practice at the instigation of the patron William H. Blackmore. His extremely numerous Indian portraits, which often display a high degree of formal elegance, are largely unknown today, while his views of the building of the railroad, less successful than those of his colleagues, are rarely exhibited.
John Karl (“Jack”) Hillers (1843–1925)
A native of Hanover, Germany and a typical example of the self-taught photographer, John K. Hillers is still underappreciated today by the museography of exploration, despite the fact that his photographic work is enormous. After serving in the army, in 1871 he joined the Powell expedition as an oarsman during the descent of the Colorado. There he learned photography from Elias O. Beaman and James Fennemore, who were briefly employed by Powell, and went on to become the expedition’s photographer in 1872. From 1872 to 1879 he shot several thousand photographs for the Powell survey, images of the canyons and plateaus of the Colorado and the native populations of the Southwest (Ute, Navajo, and Hopi). Like his colleagues on the Powell survey, he kept extremely detailed journals that provide extensive information on the conditions of exploration photography and his friendly ties with several groups of Ute and Hopi Indians, who gave him the name “Myself in the Water,” a reference to photography as a mirror. Like Timothy H. O’Sullivan and William H. Jackson, Hillers spent a lot of time producing and distributing prints, especially stereographic ones, as well as preparing the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876. Thanks to Powell, in 1879–80 he became the chief photographer of the Bureau of Ethnology and the United States Geological Survey, a dual post that he continued to occupy until his death. Virtually a state employee in the field of geographic and anthropological photography, Hillers is the author of a large number of very high-quality images, which have yet to receive the attention they deserve.
William Henry Jackson (1843–1942)
The best-known of the exploration photographers and one of the very few to have been born in the United States (in Keeseville, New York), William H. Jackson claimed to be a descendant of “Uncle Sam” in his autobiography, which, in its most complete version (Time Exposure, 1940), retraces a career that lasted nearly a century. Trained as an artist (a watercolorist), he learned photography before 1860 but served in the Union Army as a painter. After the war he left to seek his fortune in the West and opened a studio in Omaha, Nebraska with his brother, going on to take several thousand photographs for the Union Pacific Railroad in 1868–69. In 1870 he became the photographer for the Hayden survey, for which he produced several thousand negatives and tens of thousands of prints until 1878. His public renown began with the creation of Yellowstone National Park, which was associated with the dissemination of his images. Between 1873 and 1878 Jackson was the linchpin of the remarkable system of distributing images identified with the Hayden survey, which involved the creation of two detailed catalogues of photographs, one of landscapes, the other of Indian portraits. Well aware of the “show” character of his work as a photo-explorer (even as he carried documentary rigor to considerable lengths), Jackson was not unhappy to leave the survey and resume—together with his negatives, to which he had retained the rights—a business career that was fueled by his fame. Settling in Denver, he worked for several western and southwestern railroad companies. Along with his collection of images, he then joined the Detroit Publishing Company, the first big American company for the distribution of views (especially photochromes) and postcards. After a stint as the official photographer of the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, Jackson traveled the world and finally became a tremendously prolific writer of memoirs of the West and early photography. In the 1920s and 1930s, having become a legend and the darling of Washington dinner parties, Jackson had the privilege of seeing his photographic work exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which makes him a unique link between photography’s first and second centuries. His exceptional productiveness as a photographer and author, coupled with the often spectacular style of his images, explains the profusion of exhibitions and publications devoted to his work.
Andrew Joseph Russell (1829–1902)
A native of Walpole, New Hampshire who trained as a painter and served as an infantry captain in the Civil War, Andrew J. Russell was the first officer photographer and the official photographer of the army’s railroads and structures. In 1868 he became an employee of the Union Pacific Railroad, for which he took several hundred views of the building of the transcontinental line up to and including the ceremony of the “Wedding of the Rails” in May 1869. Beginning in 1868 he published these images commercially as well as in a deluxe album that appeared under the aegis of the railroad (The Great West Illustrated, 1869). A portion of his negatives was then purchased by Ferdinand V. Hayden, who republished them in Sun Pictures of Rocky Mountain Scenery (1870), a lesser-quality book that was widely distributed. It appears that he may also have briefly collaborated with the King survey in Utah. Back in New York after 1870, Russell became the staff photographer for the magazine Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, for which reason he is generally regarded as the first American photoreporter. While continuing to sell his earlier images, he remained in this post until after 1890. Of special interest by virtue of his illustration of the building of the West and the “technological sublime” and highly prized by collectors, his work remains underappreciated in the museum world.
Antonio Zeno Shindler (1823–1899)
Still little-known despite the in-depth research of Paula Fleming, Shindler was of Bulgarian or Romanian extraction and was born Antonio Zeno—he fled a threat of clan vengeance and took the patronymic of a French benefactor who was also a lover of art. Beginning in 1852 he is attested as a painter and draftsman in Philadelphia, where he exhibited regularly until 1863. Around 1867 he settled in Washington as a photographer—he opened a gallery there, in which he photographed the Indian delegations, and became a partner of William H. Blackmore and the Smithsonian Institution’s planned Indian exhibition. Blackmore entrusted him with several hundred portraits from his collection for purposes of reproduction and frequently complained about the slow pace of his work. But Shindler was busy with several projects at once—preparing the catalogue of the Smithsonian’s Indian photographs and the exhibition of 1869 (reconstructed by Paula Fleming in 2003) and perhaps also a planned exhibition of George Catlin’s Indian paintings. After 1870—a period in which, according to some sources, he accompanied one of Hayden’s expeditions—he began to produce oil paintings of some photographic portraits. He went on to hold various jobs before returning to work at the Smithsonian in 1876 as a copyist and colorer of plaster casts of various species of fish, snakes, etc., an exercise in which he enjoyed a certain degree of success, which enabled him to remain an employee of the Smithsonian “Castle” until his accidental death in 1899.
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (1840–1882)
The biography of the most important of the exploration photographers is incomplete, since Timothy H. O’Sullivan left almost no writings or verifiable images of himself. Born in Ireland (or according to some sources in New York), he learned photography from Mathew B. Brady and was employed by him during the Civil War, before leaving him in 1863 to work with Alexander Gardner. During the war he took several hundred photographs of camp scenes, equipment, fortifications, and battlefields (including the famous images of corpses at Gettysburg in 1863), while also reproducing documents and maps for the Army of the Potomac. Beginning in 1867 he was almost continuously employed by the federal government—especially the War Department—as a photographer for the King (1867–69, 1872) and Wheeler (1871, 1873–74) surveys as well as the Selfridge survey in Central America (1870). As a member of these various surveys, and often under extremely harsh conditions, he practiced wet-collodion photography on very large glass plates as well as in the stereo format, producing several hundred views of the mountainous West and the Southwest. After 1874 he continued to work for the surveys, realizing thousands of prints for distribution together with his brother-in-law, William R. Pywell. Thanks to his reputation, he was appointed a photographer for the Treasury Department in 1880, thus making him a quasi-federal government employee throughout his entire career. He died prematurely at the age of forty-two, leaving behind a corpus of several thousand photographs that is regarded today as one of the three or four major works of the American nineteenth century. The only textual source that sheds a small amount of light on his point of view as an exploration photographer is an article published in Harper’s Monthly in 1869, whose author quotes the photographer’s remarks on the pleasures and perils of “viewing” without referring to him by name.
Carleton Emmons Watkins (1829–1916)
Regarded today as the greatest landscape photographer of the century, Carleton E. Watkins was a self-taught independent entrepreneur and only rarely directly employed by the explorers. Born in Oneonta in New York State, he left for California shortly after the Gold Rush and, beginning in 1854, learned photography at the gallery of the San Francisco daguerreotypist Robert Vance. Having switched to photography on glass, in 1858 he opened his own gallery (Watkins’s Yosemite Art Gallery), which reflected his already pronounced artistic ambitions, while earning his living as an expert in real-estate disputes. Beginning in 1860–61 he devoted himself to the illustration of Yosemite Valley, which he played a substantial role in making known together with a few other operators, including Charles L. Weed and later Eadweard J. Muybridge. His “mammoth”-format and stereoscopic views traveled round the world and earned him a bronze medal at the Paris Universal Exposition in 1867. Having met the members of the California Geological Survey in the circle of John C. Frémont, whose Mariposa estate he photographed, Watkins entered into partnership with them on a contract basis from 1864 to 1869, first selling images to Josiah D. Whitney for purposes of illustration and then returning to Yosemite in 1866 equipped with a camera with a Dallmeyer lens for the express purpose of taking photographs for the California Geological Survey. It is the prints of these views that were used to produce Whitney’s lavish Yosemite Book (1868). Regarded by Clarence King as “the most skilled operator in America,” Watkins was nonetheless almost uniformly unsuccessful in business—he watched as his views of Yosemite were pirated and was forced to sell his entire first collection to the photographer and dealer Isaiah W. Taber, who later published these images under his own name. The rest of his career, during which he tirelessly photographed the cities, mines, business ventures, and natural sites of California and the Pacific Coast, was hardly more lucrative. After losing his gallery in the great San Francisco fire of 1906, he ended his days impoverished and unknown, before being rediscovered in the 1960s.
Appendix: Biographies
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