Product Description

In this illustrated study, Peter Hales examines the landscape photographer William Henry Jackson's effect on the ways Americans viewed their land and on the myths that sustain American culture.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1541023 in Books
• Published on: 1996-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 355 pages

From Library Journal
The author of Silver Cities (Temple Univ. Pr., 1984), a study of urbanization, has produced this well-researched and provocative examination of a photographer who engendered the "twin myths of the radical individual and the free landscape." Chronological chapters explore many phaseshis early influences, his survey and exploration assignments, his commercial photography, his painting career. Jackson's work made him a "powerful progenitor of the changes in the American conception of the West and of landscape in general." Includes a chronology of his life and work and an excellent bibliographical essay. An excellent look at his work in the broader context of the changing American landscape. Kathleen Collins, Library of Congress
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Publisher
An examination of the work of "the world's most famous landscape photographer"

From the Inside Flap
"[Hales] gives us a richly detailed biography and a penetrating analysis of the artist's oeuvre...Western buffs and readers interested in photography will find this an engrossing book." —Publishers Weekly

"It is good to have such a well-documented and richly-detailed book as this about one of the most important American photographers of the Western landscape We are in Peter Hales' debt..." —Alan Trachtenberg, Yale University

"[M]uch more than another biography of the famed photographer of the American West. Hales sees Jackson's career as representative of large changes in American culture and in American perception of the rapidly changing landscapes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries." —The Geographical Review

"It is hard to resist the power of William Henry Jackson's biography. Jackson was born in 1843, only four years after the invention of photography, and died in 1942. From daguerreotype to Kodachrom, Jackson's life and prolific career spanned much of photography's first century." —American Quarterly

"Well-researched and provocative examination of a photographer who engendered the 'twin myths of the radical individual and the free landscape.' Includes a chronology of his life and work and an excellent bibliographical essay. An excellent look at his work in the broader context of the changing American landscape." —Library Journal

"Hales analyzes not only Jackson’s life, photographs, and paintings, but also the way in which these are related to American culture. This work on Jackson will place Hales in the very front rank of historians of American photography, and, for that matter, American culture. It is an extremely well written and extremely important book that has magisterial comprehensiveness." —William H. Goetzmann, The University of Texas at Austin