Customer Reviews

Window on the West: The Frontier Photography of William Henry Jackson

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I spotted this book at the library near the check-out desk and grabbed it-the subtitle, The Frontier photography of William Henry Jackson, sounded like something I could pick up and browse in between tasks (this was between Thanksgiving and Christmas). I have a grown son in California and a grown daughter who is a photographer and who travels the world pursuing new vistas for her camera. I am buying her this book as it resonates with the kind of tale she has told me of her adventures. It is described as juvenile literature, which is all well and true because the language is accessible to junior-high-aged children, but nevertheless regrettable because perhaps most adults will therefore never consider reading it. Yet the writing, the concepts, and above all the photography are so full of the beauty, the optimism, the struggles and challenges of our nation in the nineteenth century as we grew from a rural thinly populated mainly eastern seaboard land to a multiethnic, continental, industrial society that I found it entirely engrossing. All these social and cultural threads weave through the narrative painlessly, and the glory of the photos of life and nature and the real people I have always heard (only as names in history books) at the time of the conquering of the west are reason you keep turning those pages.

I bought this book expecting quite a few Colorado photographs, there are some but not that many. The book itself is sort of a history of the development of the west as much as a history of Mr. Jackson, covers a lot of territory and not so much of it Jackson as it should be (and part of that includes the Chicago World's Fair of 1893). The pictures cover Mr. Jackson at all stages of his life, Colorado and other states, and that World's Fair.
Don't pay attention to the young age rating (even the book liner note refers to that) as it is written well enough to appeal to any age.
The most appealing section for me was the bit on making and using wet plate negatives then printing from them (p 23-24), I hadn't seen that information before.