Postcard Sublime: William Henry Jackson's Western Landscapes

Abstract

Photographic postcards are mass-produced and widely distributed images which participate broadly in the culture of their era. As messengers from the far side of the divide between elite and mass imagery, they offer different insights into visual culture than those familiar from works already in the photographic canon. They also shed light on the larger workings of the art historical enterprise by calling attention to the assumptions made about the nature and purpose of works of fine art photography in relation to these similar but more democratic and ephemeral objects. As the history of photography has become a familiarly accepted branch of the history of art, the medium's special intersection of fine art and documentation has become a high stakes question. Postcards, commonly relegated to status of "documentation" rather than addressed as works of art, have until recently been little studied by art historians. Their changing fortunes as collectors' objects and as scholars' concerns bespeaks larger changes in the shaping of art history, the art market, and public collections. Does such a marginal medium find itself appropriated by art history, or does it subvert that discourse? The work of William Henry Jackson (1843-1942) affords a valuable case study of photographic production, postcard publishing, image recycling from format to format, and the assimilation of both photographs and photographic postcards as fine art.The large format photographic prints of Western landscape subjects for which Jackson is best known may be found in numerous art museums,

Images on the Move

“…Donnelley & Sons corporate archive is housed at the University of Chicago Special Collections Library. This interventionist approach to the interpretation of images from source negatives was also true of the Detroit Photographic Company (Handy 2001). The Thorne miniature rooms are now displayed in the Art Institute of Chicago.…”