Product Description

Of the many published accounts to come out of William Henry Jackson's long career, The Pioneer Photographer, first published in 1929, is widely accepted as Jackson's most trusted autobiography of his early pioneering days and his first eight years (1870-1878) as the official photographer for the US Geological Survey. This reconstruction of Jackson's classic work, long out of print, presents one hundred sixty photographs and early drawings, paintings and lithographs by America's best-known landscape photographer, drawing on Jackson's diaries, other published accounts, and importantly his annotations of The Pioneer Photographer to create a complete and multidimensional view of the unfolding nineteenth-century American West. Editor Bob Blair has significantly expanded Jackson's original autobiography, reprinted here in full with the author's annotations, with seventy additional photographs, drawings, and paintings, and extensive excerpts from Jackson's writings, much of the new material drawn from archives and historical collections and never before published.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1202073 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 210 pages

From Booklist
Famed for photographs that led to the establishment of Yellowstone National Park in 1872, William Henry Jackson had an as-told-to memoir published in 1929, which provides this volume's foundation. But this is virtually a new book because it collects 136 black-and-white and 24 color images and reconciles Jackson's recollections with ancillary information about the Ferdinand Hayden geological surveys of the 1870s. An easterner, Jackson began his memoir with a description of his sound reasons for going west: a broken engagement and the lack of an occupation. After adventures in a wagon train in the waning years of the Oregon Trail, he established himself as a photographer in Omaha, where Hayden recruited him. Jackson matter-of-factly recalled the incidents of each expedition, many of which involved contretemps with Old Mag, the mule packing his cumbersome wet-plate equipment. In step with the text, the images of landscapes, companions, and Indians render the vibrancy of traveling with Jackson, if only vicariously, and make this handsome restoration a must for the Old West collection. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
His commentaries on New Mexican culture are like those of an ethnographer documenting important details of daily life that are so common to those whose lives they depict, they are often overlooked until Tapia points them out.

About the Author
Bob Blair, an elementary teacher and amateur photographer residing in Taos, New Mexico, first became intrigued with the life and work of William Henry Jackson after obtaining a first edition copy of The Pioneer Photographer. Two decades of research have led to the rediscovery and reissue of this important, but forgotten autobiography.

Customer Reviews

Good book but more words, artwork than photographs
I've just started reading the book, the biographical sections are extensive and interesting. They might, in fact, be the best part of the book (together with the update/ annotations).
I was hoping for a large collection of Mr. Jacksons photographs but instead got more text than anything. You do get some photographs but they tend to be small, not full page (they are interesting). I didn't count them but believe that there are more sketches and paintings than photographs of the man's subjects.
One thing I noted was that the editor of this edition writes that many of the photographs are "attributed to", meaning either no one is certain of the photographer but think he did them or even that an employee actually did the work.
If what you really want are 1870's photographs you'll have to find another Jackson book somewhere to get many of them.