William H. Jackson / Detroit Publishing Company Collection

For this project, images from the Denver Public Library's collection of portfolios and sample albums and glass plates from the Colorado Historical Society were processed. Jackson, who learned photography in upstate New York and Vermont before the Civil War, opened his first independent photography studio in Omaha in 1868. He served as the official photographer of the United States Geological and Geographic Surveys of the Territories (the Hayden Survey) from 1870 to 1878, settling in Denver in 1879. From 1879 to 1894, Jackson developed a national and international clientele for spectacular, often dramatic views of the American scenery and American and Mexican railways. At the same time, he developed a parallel series of photographs that promoted the growth of cities in the American West and the power of the region's mining industry. Financial setbacks in 1893 led to Jackson's sale of his negatives, in 1894, to the Detroit Publishing Company of Michigan. His negatives were subsumed into the larger company's archive, and Jackson was put on the payroll as Chief Photographer. The company in its peak years (1898-1907) recorded sales of up to seven million prints per year.

Here are some sample scans, and the associated catalog records for the scans. The first items of each pair are oversized glass plates, (the first masked with paper and tape), and smaller copies.