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William Henry Jackson and the Florida Landscape Author(s):
Michael L. Carlebach Source: The Journal of Decorative and
Propaganda Arts, Vol. 23, Florida Theme Issue (1998), pp.
86-95Published by: Florida International University Board of
Trustees on behalf of The
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William Henry Jackson and the Florida Landscape
By Michael L. Carlebach
Michael L. Carlebach, a photo-
journalist and documentary
photographer, teaches in
the School of Communication
at the University of Miami,
Coral Gables, Florida. He is
the author of several books,
the most recent being
American Photojournalism Comes of Age (Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution
Press, 1997).
Photographs by William Henry
Jackson. From Archives and
Special Collections, Otto G.
Richter Library, University of
Miami, Coral Gables, Florida,
except where noted.
illiam Henry Jackson (1843 -1942) came to Florida for the first
time in 1887, lured in part by the state's comfortable climate. By
then in middle age, the country's most famous frontier photographer
wel- comed the chance to spend the winter months in
northern and central Florida. But Jackson was not on vacation.
He came to Florida to photograph; that he could do so under a warm
winter sun made the work much more pleasant, but it was still work.
Nor was he in Florida simply to make fine-art pictures of the
legendary Florida wilderness. Jackson's employers were railroad men
and hoteliers, and they needed pictures to help sell the state as
the country's premier tourist destination. He was the right man for
the job (fig. 1). Jackson was born in April 1843 in Keesville, New
York, a tiny hamlet a few miles from Ausable Chasm, a tourist
attraction bordering Lake Champlain in the northeastern corner of
the state. He had some early training as a painter but drifted
inexorably into photography, working first as an assistant in
various photographic studios, then, after a brief stint in the Army
during the Civil War, as a retoucher for the Vermont Gallery of
Art. He left for the West in 1866 after a final, bitter argument
with his fiancee.1
As Jackson was just beginning his great Western work from a
small studio in Omaha, Nebraska, the Reverend HenryJ. Morton, an
Episcopal minister and a professor of chemistry and physics at the
University of Pennsylvania, published a three-part series in The
Philadelphia Photographer, a popular and influen- tial monthly,
extolling the opportunities awaiting serious photographers in
Florida. Despite the state's well-known pictorial qualities, few
professionals worked in Florida in that period immediately after
the Civil War, preferring, at least in Jackson's case, the dramatic
vistas of the mountain states. There was, as a result, a dearth of
salable photographs of Florida, a fact that seemed to irritate
Morton. "Florida, the land of flowers, ought also to be the land of
photographers," he wrote. "The scenery is novel, varied, and
beautiful, afford- ing fine subjects for the artist...." He noted
that Northern tourists flocked to campsites and hotels in Florida
each winter but were usually disappointed with the selection of
images available as souvenirs. "Few scenes in these
1. Jackson left for the West at 10:30 PM. on Saturday, 14 April
1866. "I know because I wrote it down. I was methodical in my
misery," he wrote in Time Exposure. The Autobiography of William
Henry Jackson (New York: G. P Putnam's Sons, 1940), 83.
DAPA 23 87
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i
Fig. 1. Old City Gate, St. Augustine, c. 1894.
&.
s-- I
:"'; ii :''
I ":* ?I?':
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Fig. 2. Stereograph of Mount
of the Holy Cross, Colorado,
1873. This image, which
seemed to many Americans to
suggest a divine hand in the
settlement of the West, was
one of Jackson's most famous.
Private collection.
":' :; .. 'a~~~~~.
far as we have been able to judge, are badly chosen and worse
executed."2 Morton was correct: there was a huge and mostly
untapped market for pho- tographs of Florida.
Despite the importuning of Morton and others, only a few
professional pho- tographers took advantage of Florida's burgeoning
tourist industry in the two decades following the Civil War. During
these years Jackson made his liv- ing trekking through the West,
compiling thousands of views of the Rocky Mountains and the
Yellowstone country as well as a stunning collection of portraits
of Native Americans. In the process he became known as America's
preeminent frontier photographer, and some of his images attained
the status of icons (fig. 2). Jackson was adept at capturing what
many of his contemporaries perceived to be the very essence of
Western settlement: the drama of building railways across a wild
and seemingly savage land and the subsequent spread of Americans
into that uncharted country. Although he assiduously cultivated an
image of himself as a simple, if also courageous and gifted
frontier photogra- pher, he was, in fact, far more complex. As
historian Peter Bacon Hales noted, Jackson "presided over the
mapping, bounding, and settling of the American West and the larger
American landscape." For more than half a century he meticulously
documented the processes that fundamentally changed the American
landscape. And the work he did in Florida mirrored his Western
portfolio, offering compelling evidence of both an extraordinary
technical mastery of the medium and an uncanny ability to make
pictures encapsulating the dominant concerns of Gilded Age America
(fig. 3).3 It was an age that endlessly extolled enterprise and
industry, a time when the entrepreneur was king. Commercial values
crept into all aspects of American society, affecting the arts and
letters almost as much as politics and business affairs. After the
Civil War, for instance, Horatio Alger Jr. philosophized to
2. Rev. H. J. Morton, "East Florida and Photography," The
Philadelphia Photographer 4 (June 1867): 174.
3. Peter B. Hales, 'A Visual Proponent of Myths About the
American Landscape," Chronicle of Higher Education (26 October
1988): B64. See also Peter B. Hales, William Henry Jackson and the
Transformation of the American Landscape (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1988).
88 DAPA 23
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Fig. 3. George Street, St. generations of American children -
especially boys - about the moral path to great wealth and
happiness; in his 135 books for young readers, material
ugustine, c. . success was always the paramount goal and
prosperity the reward for hard work and clean living.
Jackson's work offered subtle corroboration and validation of
that cultural stance. In his images the land is indeed beautiful,
but so, too, are the uses made of it by men of vision and ambition.
From 1871 to 1878 he worked for the United States Geological Survey
of the Territories under Professor Ferdinand Vandiveer Hayden,
providing the government with visual evidence of the shape and
texture of the Western territories. The work done for the Hayden
Survey conveyed to the world the wonders of the West. Some of the
material, such as Jackson's views of the fabulous geysers and rock
formations along the Yellowstone River in Wyoming Territory, so
impressed members of Congress that they were moved to create the
first national park. Preservation was never more than a secondary
goal, however. Indeed, the Hayden Survey's detailed maps and
geological studies were manna for a legion of businessmen, includ-
ing the miners, railroad builders, ranchers, and farmers who were
anxious to use and profit from the land.4
4. Richard A. Bartlett, Great Surveys of the American West
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962), xi-xii, 374-376.
DAPA 23 89
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Fig. 4. Coquina shoreline, ;:
Indian River (with lone man
sitting amid the rocks),...
c. 1880-1897. - - ...........~ .. . . ~ * .............?
.....................~ ...... .. ................................
i... ..............
During his years with the Hayden Survey, both Jackson and his
pictures became famous, and he began mass-producing photographic
prints and selling them at his new studio in Denver, Colorado. In
the days before the halftone trans- formed the printing industry,
allowing photographs to be mechanically repro- duced by magazines
and newspapers, photographers often sold pictures to a public eager
to own inexpensive views of celebrities, news events, and popular
attractions. Jackson tapped into this market. He sold his
photographs in a vari- ety of formats, from cheap cartes-de-viste
and stereographs to handsome dis- play prints made from mammoth
glass-plate negatives. The pictures helped publicize both the land
itself and the work of railroaders and town-builders who were
busily transforming it.
When Jackson left the Hayden Survey in 1879, commissions from a
grateful railroad industry more than made up for the loss of his
government salary and allowed him to combine his love for travel
and the outdoors with commercial photography. "I wanted to get a
line on my chances of doing some extensive work for the western
railroads," he wrote in his autobiography. "It seemed to me they
were missing a great opportunity to publicize and popularize their
scenic routes."5 Success was immediate, and he began referring to
himself as a "commercial landscape photographer." It is a useful
and entirely apt description and one that is helpful in
interpreting the work he produced in Florida.
As railroads across the country contracted with Jackson to
photograph their routes, he was able to take his pick of
assignments. He noted that when "cold weather set in I found myself
in Mexico or California or Louisiana or Florida." Hotels that
catered to tourists arriving on trains also began using Jackson's
services as their owners began "to understand the value of
advertising their
5. Jackson, Time Exposure, 252.
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scenic attractions...."6 Being in the tropics during the winter
months was far more enjoyable and productive than remaining
hunkered down in Denver, and by his own accounts, Jackson relished
the work (fig. 4). Nothing in his writing suggests dissatisfaction
with either his clients or the assignments they threw his way. "I
shall enjoy working here in the East," he told an interviewer late
in the century, "for it is a little known country to me, compared
at least, to the Rocky Mountain section." Using his many contacts
in the railroad industry, Jackson planned "to roam at will over the
North and South and East, arranging for series of pictures of the
localities most visited by tourists both of our own and foreign
countries."7
With other forms of transportation either scarce or hopelessly
slow and un- comfortable, especially for one loaded down with
hundreds of pounds of pho- tographic paraphernalia, the railroads
provided a neat and comfortable alter- native, and usually did so
for free. "I was moved from station to station and from point to
point...," he wrote in 1875. "By making it a point to keep on the
right side of all the various employees, I was enabled to go back
and forth, and to be put off at any point I desired."8 That is a
bit of an understatement. Some of the lines for which he provided
pictures went to great lengths to accommo- date the famous
photographer. The Denver and Rio Grande offered the use of the
president's car, for instance, and others gave Jackson his own
private car complete with darkroom and a servant.
Such cordial relations with the men who ran America's railroads
made it possi- ble for Jackson to go just about anywhere in the
country and do so on short notice and in relative comfort. Provided
with sturdy cases for cameras, lenses, and other equipment, "the
travelling photographer may journey from one end of the continent
to the other," Jackson wrote in 1888, "and be able to defy
the..
.baggage smasher, the severest jolting and dust of the Concord
coach, the more trying rattle of the lumber wagon and... the
idiosyncracies of the festive pack mule...."9
Jackson's southern excursions in the 1880s and 1890s helped do
for Florida what his work for the railroads and the government did
for the West. A close examination of photographs of Florida
credited specifically to Jackson indi- cates that he had
commissions from Henry Morrison Flagler's (1830-1913) railroad and
perhaps from several of Flagler's grand hotels. With such assign-
ments Jackson was assured a tidy profit, and along the way he was
able to add significantly to his collection of pictures that could
be marketed to tourists, either as full-size display prints or
postcards. After 1898, when he sold his archive of images to the
Detroit Publishing Company, he increasingly turned his attention to
the production of inexpensive views, many of them printed in color
and sold to tourists eager to purchase some visual memento of their
trip to Florida.10
Jackson's decision to enter the postcard business should come as
no surprise, for he was always interested in making his pictures
available to a mass audience.
6. Ibid., 259. 7. Cited in "Picturesque America in Colors,"
Wilson's Photographic Magazine 35 (April 1898): 179. 8. W H.
Jackson, "Field Work," The Philadelphia Photographer 12 (March
1875): 92. 9. W H. Jackson, "Landscape Photography with Large
Plates," in W Jerome Harrison and A. H.
Elliott, ed., The International Annual of Anthony's Photographic
Bulletin (New York: E. and H. T. Anthony and Co. Publishers, 1888),
316.
10. Fritiof Fryxell, "William H. Jackson, Photographer, Artist,
Explorer," in Frank R. Fraprie, ed., The American Annual of
Photography 1939 (Boston: American Photographic Publishing Co.,
1938), 218.
DAPA 23 91
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Fig. 5. Green Street, St.
Augustine, c. 1880-1897.
Cr e-t 7 ;S- e3 7 e Z, St ae S t ?. r -. 1~fi; ,
* Ct
t
Fig. 6. Orange grove, Seville,
c. 1880-1897.
4-
1. __ . ,i J i.+. AO ,I,
...J4 4O
Fig. 7. Pelican Island on the Indian River, c. 1880-1897. The
Detroit Publishing Company collection,
U.S. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
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Fig. 9. Two women in bonnets,
Silver Springs, c. 1902. The
Detroit Publishing Company
collection, U.S. Library
of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Fig. 8. Three men in a boat,
mangroves, Jupiter Narrows,
c. 1880-1897.
Picture postcards had first appeared in the United States during
the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. When Congress
formally approved the new format five years later, the country was
flooded with views almost overnight. Where others saw only a fatal
decline in the intricate beauty of the handmade print, Jackson saw
opportunity. The reproduction of his pictures in halftone, whether
as postcards or periodical illustrations, made it possible to reach
and affect more people, and that was always his primary objective.
'As the process of halftone engraving improved," he wrote, "not
only did mag- azine pictures cut into the old 'views' market, but
cheap (and increasingly excellent) reproductions, in color as well
as in black-and-white, further low- ered the demand for photo
prints. The latter had to be made one at a time, while
photo-engravings could be turned out by the thousands.""
For Jackson, the association with Detroit Publishing led to a
resurgence in his photographic output. Though undoubtedly
interested in the manufactur- ing and marketing ends of the
business, his first love was photography. "Now that I was assured
that the pictures I took would be profitably reproduced," he wrote,
"I went back to my outdoor career with a zest as great as I have
ever known before."'2
The Detroit Publishing Company collection, now housed in the
Library of Congress, contains more than twenty-five thousand
glass-plate negatives and transparencies, nine hundred forty-one of
which were made in Florida. In addi- tion, the collection contains
more than nine hundred mammoth glass-plate negatives and prints
made in Mexico and the United States during the last two decades of
the nineteenth century with Jackson's
eighteen-by-twenty-two-inch
11. Jackson, Time Exposure, 320. 12. Ibid., 324.
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Fig. 10. Docked excursion boat,
Silver Springs, c. 1902. The
Detroit Publishing Company
collection, U.S. Library of
Congress, Washington, D.C.
Fig. 11. Excursion boat,
Silver Springs, c. 1902. The
Detroit Publishing Company
collection, U.S. Library of
Congress, Washington, D.C.
camera.13 A small handmade book containing original prints of
Florida byJackson and a few others is now housed in the Archives
and Special Collections of the Otto G. Richter Library, University
of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida. On the surface, the photographs
merely tell us what certain places in Florida looked like at the
turn of the century. But there is considerably more to the story.
The choice of subject matter is significant. Hotels and other
tourist facilities are lovingly presented; so, too, are well-known
attractions such as the narrow streets and ancient buildings of
historic St. Augustine (fig. 5). Fecundity and easy living are
subtexts throughout, from Jackson's images of lush orange groves
near Seville (fig. 6) to those of mud flats in the Indian River
teeming with pelicans (fig. 7). The photographs Jackson produced in
Florida were meant to promote tourism and development, and the
message is decidedly beneficent and alluring. Absent from Jackson's
Florida portfolio are any images that question or cast doubt on the
rush to exploit either coastal ham- mock or riverside. We see
instead a pretty state, one that offers visitors and residents
alike effortless living amid natural beauty. Transportation,
whether by rail or boat or horse and carriage, is readily
available, and accommodations for visitors are plentiful and
luxurious.
Jackson's photographs of rivers in Florida seem at first to
offer a slightly less salubrious view, occasionally conveying a
sense of mystery and awe. But that view is usually tempered by the
presence of human figures. Jackson pho- tographed a twisted and
forbidding tangle of mangroves along Jupiter Inlet, for instance,
but included in the scene three men relaxing in a rowboat (fig. 8).
At Silver Springs on the Oklawaha River, Jackson made a number of
pictures, and all of them included whimsical touches of humanity.
In one, two women
13. Access to the Detroit Publishing Company collection is now
available on the Internet at the American Memory collection. See
www.loc.gov.
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Fig. 12. Deep Creek,
c. 1880-1897. This appears
to be a cropped version of
negative number 3586 in the
Detroit Publishing Company
catalogue.
in fancy bonnets pose in their canoe (fig. 9); in others, a
jaunty excursion boat loads up with passengers and drifts in the
current (figs. 10 and 11). On the narrow reaches of Deep Creek, he
photographed a small steamer plowing through the mist toward a lone
silhouetted figure in a skiff (fig. 12). Here was raw nature,
slightly menacing perhaps, but made much less so by the presence of
plucky human beings, as wilderness gave way, slowly, to the hand of
man. For Jackson and many other Gilded Age Americans, this process
of settlement and the development of natural resources was
inevitable and ultimately benefi- cial, and his pictures reflected
this philosophy. He was, after all, a commercial landscape
photographer. o
DAPA 23 95
.,.
, A
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Article Contentsp. 87p. [86]p. 88p. 89p. 90p. 91p. 92p. 93p.
94p. 95
Issue Table of ContentsThe Journal of Decorative and Propaganda
Arts, Vol. 23, Florida Theme Issue (1998), pp. 1-380Front Matter
[pp. 1-6]Introduction [pp. 7-9]Selling Sarasota: Architecture and
Propaganda in a 1920s Boom Town [pp. 10-31]Perfume, Postcards, and
Promises: The Orange in Art and Industry [pp. 32-47]From Augustine
to Tangerine: Florida at the U.S. World's Fairs [pp. 48-85]William
Henry Jackson and the Florida Landscape [pp. 86-95]Henry M.
Flagler's Hotel Ponce de Len [pp. 96-111]A Tale of Three Henrys
[pp. 112-143]Pan Am: Miami's Wings to the World [pp. 144-161]Dream
and Substance: Araby and the Planning of Opa-Locka [pp.
162-189]Inventing Antiquity: The Art and Craft of Mediterranean
Revival Architecture [pp. 190-207]Dream Palaces: The Motion Picture
Playhouse in the Sunshine State [pp. 208-237]Edens, Underworlds,
and Shrines: Florida's Small Tourist Attractions [pp. 238-259]The
Memorable Landscapes of William Lyman Phillips [pp. 260-287]Touring
Florida through the Federal Writers' Project [pp. 288-305]The
Chautauquans and Progressives in Florida [pp. 306-321]Tracing
Overtown's Vernacular Architecture [pp. 322-333]Igor Polevitzky's
Architectural Vision for a Modern Miami [pp. 334-359]Pragmatism
Meets Exoticism: An Interview with Paul Silverthorne [pp.
360-380]Back Matter