American photographer. Jackson began his career as a colorist and retoucher in photographic studios in New York and Vermont. After enlisting in the infantry and working as a sketcher of camp life, he began to travel. He reached Omaha, NE, in 1867 and set up a photographic studio with his brother, Edward Jackson. He began to make expeditions along the Union Pacific Railroad, photographing the Pawnee, Omaha, and Winnebago people, and points of interest in and around Omaha. He gained a contract with the E. & H. T. Anthony Company to supply them with 10,000 views of American scenery. In 1870 the government surveyor Ferdinand V. Hayden visited Jackson’s studio and invited him to join his US Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories. Jackson worked with Hayden every year until 1878, using wet collodion negatives to photograph the Oregon trail (1870), Yellowstone (1871), the Teton Mountains (1872), the Rocky Mountains (1873), the Southwest (1877), and the Northern territories (1878).
In 1879 Jackson discontinued his work for the government and set up the Jackson Photographic Co. in Denver, CO. Railway companies hired him to photograph their routes to stimulate travel; using collodion dry plate materials he produced promotional images for the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad Company, the Colorado Central and the Pacific Railroad. Over a period of about 15 years Jackson made about 30,000 images. During the summers he travelled extensively throughout the USA, Canada, and Latin America. Jackson’s influence on the image and the idea of the American West was deep and lasting. In subjects ranging from Native Americans to geology to the machine’s transformation of the landscape by mills and railroads, his images created an accessible narrative of the taming of wild places. Moran, who travelled with Jackson but also used Jackson’s photographs to depict places he had not been, was clearly in his debt; Jackson’s work for commercial publishers extended the potential use and influence of his pictures. His penchant for grand vistas corroborated the public’s taste for heroic spectacle, allowing Jackson to maintain his popularity even as the era of exploration was succeeded by an age of rapid economic expansion.
In 1893 he exhibited at the Columbia Exposition, Chicago, and was the fair’s official photographer. To commemorate the event he produced a special album of 100 views that sold for $1000. In 1894 he published Wonder Places … The Most Perfect Pictures of Magnificent Scenes in the Rocky Mountains … Masterworks of the World’s Greatest Photographic Artist. That same year he accompanied the World Transportation Commission on a worldwide study tour of public transportation systems; the magazine Harper’s Weekly commissioned his pictures of the trip. When the tour ended, Jackson became head cameraman and part owner of the Photochrom Company of Detroit (later the Detroit Publishing Company) and worked there until the company collapsed in 1924.
