(#167425) YOSEMITE PHOTOCHROMS. William Henry Jackson.
YOSEMITE PHOTOCHROMS.
YOSEMITE PHOTOCHROMS.
YOSEMITE PHOTOCHROMS.
YOSEMITE PHOTOCHROMS.

YOSEMITE PHOTOCHROMS. Detroit: Published by Detroit Photographic Co., n.d. copyright 1898. Five "Photochroms," approximately 23x17.8 cm (5x7 inches), all but one captioned and copyright 1898 by the Detroit Photographic Co. Occasionally mistaken for hand-colored photographs, these stunning images were created by a photolithographic process by which black and white negatives are applied to multiple lithographic stones and colors are added one stone at a time. In 1897 Western photographer William Henry Jackson (1843-1942) sold his entire stock of negatives to the Detroit Photographic Co. in 1897, providing them with 1000s of negatives that enabled the company to produce millions of postcards, prints and large panoramas. In 1903, after the resignation of Edwin Husher, Jackson took over the supervising and publishing of the images, as well as supervising a crew of forty artisans and a dozen traveling salesman. "The Detroit Photographic Company was launched as a photographic publishing firm in the late 1890s by Detroit businessman and publisher William A. Livingstone, Jr., and photographer and photo-publisher Edwin H. Husher. They obtained the exclusive rights to use the Swiss "Photochrom" process for converting black-and-white photographs into color images and printing them by photolithography. This process permitted the mass production of color postcards, prints and albums for sale to the American market. Late in 1897, Livingstone persuaded the accomplished American landscape photographer William Henry Jackson to join the firm. This added the thousands of negatives produced by Jackson to the Detroit Photographic Company's inventory. Jackson's collection included city and town views, images of prominent buildings, scenes along railroad lines, views of hotels and resorts, and the like. In the late 1890s, the Detroit Photographic Company expanded their inventory to include photographic copies of works of art, which were popular educational tools as well as inexpensive home decor. The firm was known as the Detroit Photographic Co. until 1905 when it became the Detroit Publishing Company. Jackson became the plant manager in 1903, leaving him with less time to travel and take photographs. With the declining sale of photographs and postcards during World War I, and the introduction of new and cheaper printing methods used by competing firms, the Detroit Publishing Company went into receivership in 1924. They liquidated their assets in 1932" (Nat DesMarais). "Photochroms and Phostints (the brand name for the Detroit Photographic Company’s Photochrom postcards), as well as their black-and-white source images, which were taken by such esteemed late nineteenth and early twentieth century American photographers as William Henry Jackson, Lycurgus Solon Glover, and Henry Greenwood Peabody. Together, these photographers cataloged the natural and man-made marvels of the continent, bringing their cameras from the great cities of the Northeast and Upper Midwest to the mountains and deserts of the still-wild West. Photochroms were a European invention ... They were the creation of a Swiss lithographer named Hans Jacob Schmid who, in 1888, devised the earliest example of commercially viable color photography, although the process is actually a hybrid of traditional photo-developing techniques and stone lithography. 'They start with a black-and-white negative,' explains Arqué, 'which is exposed on lithographic stones, as many as are needed.' Four stones --- one each for red, yellow, blue, and black --- were the minimum for most Photochroms, but some were created using as many as 14 stones when subtleties in color were required. Each stone was individually inked and its image, or piece of an image, was transferred to a sheet of paper, which was printed layer by layer until a full-color version of the scene originally captured in black-and-white was revealed. For the most part, DPC’s postcards and prints focused on an idealized America, from the leisure of canoeing in New York’s Adirondacks to the tourist spectacle of rain dances performed by Zuni Pueblo Indians. That’s what sold postcards, and by 1905, DPC was selling a lot of them, enough to support a staff of 40, with outlets in New York and Los Angeles. Between 1899 and 1905, DPC’s catalog grew to include 1,600 American scenes, from small postcards to poster-size 'Mammoths.' They even sold black-and-whites (they owned all those Jackson negatives, so why not?). In a good year, DPC printed some 7 million images. The first decade of the 20th century was also when DPC joined forces with one of the biggest mythologizers of the American West, the Fred Harvey Company, which had built a string of restaurants and hotels along the route of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, as well as other lines. Harvey ordered hundreds of thousands of DPC Phostints, which were sold in hotel gift shops to guests, alongside the jewelry, blankets, and baskets the company commissioned from the photogenic native populations. By the second decade of the century, though, Photochroms and Phostints were losing their luster, in part because of competition from publishers whose offset-lithographed products cost much less than DPC’s, but also because of World War I, which diverted resources to the war effort. After the war, in 1920, American was gripped by recession, which forced DPC into receivership in 1924, when its inventory of 40,000 negatives were sold. Some ended up at the State Historical Society of Colorado but most now reside in the Library of Congress, including 25,000 negatives, 300 Photochroms, and 900 glass plates by William Henry Jackson" (2014, Ben Marks, Collectors Weekly website) While Jackson's Photochroms of Yellowstone National Park are common, these views of Yosemite National Park are not. Apparently, among the 1000s of "Photochroms" held by the Library of Congress, there are only three images of Yosemite. We do not know the total quantity of Yosemite images, but in addition to these five, there is a general view of the valley framed by El Capitan and Bridal Veil Fall, as well as a view of Mirror Lake. These are very early colorized images of Yosemite scenery. All prints are in fine condition. (#167425).

Printing identification statement for this book:
"Coming Soon"