The Birth of a Century: Early Color Photographs of America

by Jim Hughes, William Henry Jackson, DETROIT PHOTOGRAPHIC Co. (Photographer)

The final decades of the nineteenth century and the birth of the twentieth in America are illustrated as never before in this book of unique color images that actually predate the invention of color photography. The secret process which produced them combines the delicacy of watercolors with the look and feel of modern color photographs. The pictures are largely the work of the legendary William Henry Jackson, the pioneer photographer who explored the frontiers of the old American west with huge wet-plate cameras and a portable darktent strapped to the back of his trusty mule.
Jackson's name is synonymous with high adventure, and Jim Hughes' richly detailed introduction tells a gripping story. Jackson was born in 1843 in New York, and by the 1860s he was on his first trip west, working as a bullwhacker on a wagon train when the nation's unfinished rail lines would take him no further. Finally, on the edge of the western frontier, he began photographing the wild and often spectacularly beautiful landscape of a wilderness soon to be forced into submission by the advancing railroads.
Over the next three decades Jackson became the most celebrated of a small and hardy band of pioneer photographers, creating a striking photographic record of the rapidly changing face of America. When his photographs of Yellowstone were credited with helping to persuade Congress to make the region the first National Park, his place in history was secure. From the Rockies to California, from the Great Lakes to the deep South, from teeming New York City to forested New Hampshire these photographs capture both urban and rural landscapes to provide a unique picture of the social and physical evolution of the United States. The book is arranged as a visual tour of the country, and is written with fascinating insights into America's places and politics at the turn of the century.
In 1897 Jackson sold the bulk of his enormous archive of photographs to the Detroit Photographic Company, which he joined as a partner. The firm had recently licensed Photochrom, a secret Swiss process for turning black-and-white photographs into color. Completely distinct from today's four-color reproduction, Photochrom is a continuous-tone color rendition of a black-and-white photograph that uses multiple impressions from lithographic stones. The color produced was astonishingly naturalistic, and it was to this process that Jackson devoted his final years of active photography. Gone now was the mule, as he traveled North America in a specially equipped railroad car in search of images to tell the story of the closing of one epoch and the dawning of another.
William Henry Jackson died in 1942 after a lifetime that spanned almost the entire history of photography. In recent years, thousands of never distributed Photochrom prints were discovered in a Montana warehouse. This book offers an ample selection of the finest, all published for the first time.

224 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1999

Reviews

[Joanne Alexander]

In the 1890s there was a process developed, now lost to time, that used multiple plates and a lot of skill to produce the most delicately tinted color photographs. William Henry Jackson was an early photographer with an artistic eye, who traveled the not-yet-tamed Western US and eventually the rest of the country as well and amassed a huge collection of early color photographs of America. This book explains the history of Jackson and the photographs and presents a stunning assortment of pictures that start (by chance) with photos of Yellowstone (that I just visited) and end with two pictures on the last page of Charleston SC (where I live.) Every one of the photos can be gazed at endlessly as they are gorgeous and give you the feel that you have just stepped into America at the turn of the last century.

[James]

A lovely collection of North American photos with a fair amount of text.