Lived: New York, Vermont and Washington, D.C.
Education: None
Date of Creation: 1871
Significance: In 1869 William was a commission from the Union Pacific Railroad to document the scenery along the various railroad routes for promotional purposes. Because of this, Jackson got an invitation to join the 1870 U.S. government survey of the Yellowstone River and Rocky Mountains. Since much of the West was unexplored, Jackson was the main photographer to capture all the landmarks of the West. His photographs played a tremendous role in convincing congress to create the Yellowstone National Park in 1872. Jackson is considered one of the most accomplished explorers of the American continent for his involvement of the West. If not for Jackson, who knows how history could have been changed.
Techniques: Jackson worked with several different kinds of equipment. His worked used the collodion process which was invented in 1848 by Fredrick Scoot Archer (I encourage you to look up more about the collodion process). Jackson usually carried a stereographic camera, an 8x10 plate size camera and one as large as 18x22. These cameras required fragile, heavy glass plates which had to be coated, exposed, and developed on-site, before the wet-collodion emulsion dried. Without lighting equipment, exposure times were very difficult to figure out. Depending on the lighting conditions, five seconds and twenty minutes were not uncommon. It could take up to an hour to get a final image.
Motivations: I think Jackson sums up his motivations with his work and with his own words: "Portrait photography never had any charms for me, so I sought my subjects from the house-tops, and finally from the hill-tops and about the surrounding country; the taste strengthening as my successes became greater in proportion to the failures."
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