William Henry Jackson’s Photochroms

William Henry Jackson, Falls of the Bow River, Banff, Alberta, 1902, photochrom, 7 x 9 in., College of Charleston Libraries.

  • The tiny town of Silverton, Colorado, snuggles in a valley beneath the majestic Sultan Mountain. The valley is marked with miniature-looking buildings and dirt paths, encompassed by lush trees, rugged slopes, and a partly cloudy turquoise sky.
    William Henry Jackson, Silverton and Sultan Mountain, Colorado, 1901, photochrom, 7 x 9 in., Frost Library Archives & Special Collections
  • The shining Bow River cascades atop a steep slope, forming an elegant waterfall shrouded by evergreen pines. Behind the falls, distant mountains soar against the soft, cloud-speckled sky.
    William Henry Jackson, Falls of the Bow River, Banff, Alberta, 1902, photochrom, 7 x 9 in., Frost Library Archives & Special Collections
  • Colorized photograph of a dazzling sunrise viewed from a mountaintop that showcases an array of orange, pink, and gold across the clouded sky.
    William Henry Jackson, Sunrise from Pike’s Peak, 1899, photochrom, 3.5 x 7 in., Frost Library Archives & Special Collections. Photo by the author.
  • This black-and-white photograph shows a round lighthouse on a steep and rugged cliff. A person overlooks the abyss and the sky, which appears foggy and hazed.
    Edweard Muybridge, Point Reyes Light-House, Looking West, 1870, stereograph, Library of Congress.

Introduction

The maker of these three colorful photochrom images is William Henry Jackson, a renowned photographer known best for his contributions to introducing images of the American West to the rest of the country. These photographs exhibit the beauty of the natural world and depict idealized weather. From snow-covered mountains to desolate and dry deserts, Jackson’s photochrom images as a series represent environment and weather to fit a certain audience: the American public, people who were looking to consume the West.

Artist’s Biography: 1843–1942

Many years before becoming a significant figure in the history of American photography, Jackson was a young child who loved travelling. He emphasizes this point multiple times in his autobiography, noting that when he was about a year old, he acquired a habit that became life-long: travelling.1 Through numerous trips, Jackson saw and experienced the expanse of the world and the different environments it offered. He was also exposed to the ideas of Manifest Destiny, a nineteenth-century ideology that the United States was divinely ordained by God to expand its dominion and settle across the entire continent of North America, which pushed Americans westward.

For most of his photography career, Jackson worked for the U.S. Geological Survey. In 1870, he became part of the survey to explore and document Yellowstone and the Rocky Mountains. Jackson took thousands of black-and-white photographs throughout his time with the survey, which he eventually colored to produce vivid images—like the three in this exhibition—using a specific method known as the photochrom process. These types of images display pronounced, colorful hues that could not otherwise be achieved with photography at that time. Afterwards, he joined the Detroit Publishing Company2 in 1898 and sold almost five hundred photochrom images to the company, widely distributing them to the rest of the U.S. with the intention to entice travelers and settlers to the wonders of the west.

Photochrom Process

In the late nineteenth century, photography was still in monochrome and color photography had not yet been fully developed nor commonly used. There were two additional steps to produce colored images after photographing: the method of manual coloring, in which artists paint over the black-and-white photographs, and the photochrom process, a photolithographic technique that reproduced colored images. The former was a technique that enriched black-and-white photography by hand-applying pigments like aniline dyes and watercolors. Jackson himself would meticulously and delicately apply these pigments with very fine brushes, which required significant skill. Additionally, Jackson would later work with the latter process, a printing method that created colored versions of the monochrome photographs. Jackson often used this process to produce numerous copies of vibrant postcards and prints3, with a portion of them eventually making their way to Amherst College.

At the time, it was incredibly challenging to capture both the sky and the land in a single photograph since the sky was simply too bright. For example, in Eadweard Muybridge’s First Order Lighthouse at Punta de Los Reyes, 1871, it is notable that detail is unavailable, particularly the skies and the seas that make up the composition. The bright light takes up most of the background and only offers a hint of the sea and horizon.4 With that in mind, Jackson’s use of these techniques was a significant and meaningful insight into exploring the process of capturing weather by hand and camera. He addressed the limitation of photography through this process by painting over the monochrome photographs—which may have also been less detailed—and adding his own non-photographic representation of weather: fluffy clouds, colorful sunsets, or snowy peaks.

Sunrise from Pike’s Peak, Colorado, 1899

In this photochrom image, Jackson captures a stunning view from Pike’s Peak and showcases the early morning luminescence. The sky is depicted as an ombré of light gray, orange, gold, hints of pink, and light blue, which is consistent with that of a sunrise.

There are multiple clouds far and wide in the image. In the bottom part, overlooked by the peak itself, there is a bed of fluffy, stratus clouds. Thick, dark ones are apparent in the top half, but may be due to the shadows made from the blazing sun. The middle displays cumulus clouds, with the rising sun going through them, producing the previously mentioned ombré. The sky itself is a flurry of light blue and bright orange, and the sun peeks through the clouds, as if it will soon clear away the suspended water droplets. 

The whole image depicts a scene that implies serenity and peace, as well as clarity. Weather in day-to-day life is often unpredictable and uncertain, but this image seems to stabilize it in a way that represents the natural world as tame. Ambiguity is erased. With the thought of Jackson applying pigment on a monochrome photograph in mind, viewers are not just seeing what the sky looked like from Pike’s Peak, but also his subjective decisions that lead to a delicately and deliberately assembled feeling: the colors and clouds that are added produce a spiritual and heavenly experience, like one has transcended. In using this technique, weather becomes more symbolic than meteorological. Jackson aims to capture an inspiring symbol of the American West in this photochrom.

Falls of the Bow River, Banff, Alberta, Canada, 1902

In this photochrom image, Jackson depicts a slightly cloudy day, with no apparent harsh weather conditions. The sky is a rich blue, with the river below it sporting a mellow turquoise. The trees are evergreen and the ground is dotted with hints of dirty brown and emerald, like the weather has become warmer, but not hot. The air seems crisp and cool and the mountains appear to be snow-capped. Overall, the image depicts a sunny scene, which many might describe as an ideal day. 

Similar to the previous image, weather is represented as a symbol of serenity and stability. It is illustrated not as a dynamic force, but merely a backdrop, showing the natural world as reassuring and submissive, a patient thing ready to be consumed physically by tourists and settlers and visually by the rest of the U.S. This is a showcase of human idealism: nature’s accessibility is defined by its safety, beauty, and how many people have settled there. These ideals were aligned with those of Manifest Destiny, with both suggesting a world that can be controlled by humans.

Through photochrom photography, Jackson turns these imprecise monochrome images into a romantic vision of nature: vibrant and vivid, as well as serene and splendid, things that could not be captured outright by traditional photography during that time.5 However, each product was painted over with his own artistic interpretation of the scene. He did not colorize them at the location he took the photographs. Likely, he applied pigments in an enclosed room, like a studio, implying the photochroms not as observation, but as design and personal, artistic interpretation. In light of this, the natural world, especially weather, starts to become something curated for public consumption. It is clear that his decisions were made with the thought of aligning what is seen on the image with human ideals. 

Silverton and Sultan Mountain, Colorado, 1901

This photochrom image depicts a cloudy, but richly blue sky. The majestic Sultan Mountain dominates over the seemingly tiny town of Silverton. The whole scene seems to be basked in light, effectively producing a dreamy feeling. In this image, Jackson documents the events leading up to its capture in his diary. 

This is what he says about the weather the day before: 

“The clouds hung low & portended rain…The ground was soft & wet…altho it was sprinkling & clouds were scudding down about us everywhere, it [had] began to storm in a manner that left no doubts as to the remainder of the day…wind & rain coming down as cold…”6

The day of capture: 

“Morning opened [promisingly]…it had cleared up nicely by the time we reached timberline…the weather was fair but windy and quite cold, so cold I shivered all the time.”7

The final image presents a cloudy, but bright scene, with the effects of the dismal weather the day before. This accentuation of majesty and the aestheticized version of the image is a stark contrast from the multitude of challenges Jackson encountered during his journey. The depiction of the idealized landscape and weather highlights the artistic decisions he made during the photochrom process, once again exhibiting a tamed and consumable version of nature that aligned with human ideals. Nature was illustrated not as it actually was, but as it was craved to be seen by the masses. He represented weather as a tame and controllable thing, flattening the dynamic and unpredictable parts of it. Through this action, Jackson not only molded how people perceived the American west, but also fortified the broader national tendency to idealize and domesticate the natural world.

Note: The Jackson photochroms in Amherst College’s Frost Library have not been digitized, so images in this article were taken by the author or sourced from a collection of nearly identical photochroms that have been digitized at the College of Charleston. 

Footnotes

  1. William Henry Jackson, Time Exposure: The Autobiography of William Henry Jackson (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1940), 6. ↩︎
  2. John Gruber, “William Henry Jackson and the Detroit Publishing Co. 1897–1903,” Railroad History, no. 210 (2014): 80–87. ↩︎
  3. Lee H. Whittlesey, “‘Everyone Can Understand a Picture’: Photographers and the Promotion of Early Yellowstone,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 49, no. 2 (1999): 2–13. ↩︎
  4. Elizabeth W. Hutchinson, “Conjuring in Fog: Eadweard Muybridge at Point Reyes,” in Picturing, ed. Rachael Z. DeLue (University of Chicago Press, 2016), 116. ↩︎
  5. Hutchinson, “Conjuring in Fog,” 117. ↩︎
  6. William Henry Jackson, The Diaries of William Henry Jackson, Frontier Photographer (Glendale, California: A. H. Clark Co., 1959), 301. ↩︎
  7.  William Henry Jackson, Diaries, 303. ↩︎