William Henry Jackson and Florida Landscape

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Florida International University Board of Trustees on behalf of The Wolfsonian-FIU is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts. http://www.jstor.org 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. 86-95 Published by: Florida International University Board of Trustees on behalf of The Wolfsonian-FIU Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1504164 Accessed: 23-04-2015 22:05 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. This content downloaded from 200.24.17.12 on Thu, 23 Apr 2015 22:05:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Texto sobre la fotografía y paisaje

Transcript of William Henry Jackson and Florida Landscape

  • Florida International University Board of Trustees on behalf of The Wolfsonian-FIU is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts.

    http://www.jstor.org

    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

    Wolfsonian-FIUStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1504164Accessed: 23-04-2015 22:05 UTC

    Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp

    JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

    This content downloaded from 200.24.17.12 on Thu, 23 Apr 2015 22:05:35 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

  • 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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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

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    .,.

    , 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