“Picture Maker of the Old West”: W. H. Jackson and the Birth of Photographic Archives in the United States

Abstract

Inventor of the hand-held stereoscope and “autocrat of the breakfast table,” the editor of the Atlantic Monthly proved himself, in an important series of articles on photography, a master of rhetoric. Behind the Epicurean touches with which he colored the “mirror with a memory” – the most “audacious, remote, improbable” discovery of human ingenuity – and through the irony of his thundering philosophical conclusions – “form is henceforth divorced from matter,” which “as a visible object is of no great use any longer” – the modern reader perceives O. W. Holmes's keen awareness of the documentary possibilities born of photography. In this essay, it is one of the first sketches of such a “Bank of Nature” that I shall examine.

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