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Cañon of the Rio Las Animas

Creator

American Photographer · 1843–1942

Artist

From age twelve until age ninety-nine, William Henry Jackson was involved on some level with photography. After a tour of duty in the Civil War, he headed West and eventually settled in Omaha, Nebraska, where he opened a portrait photography studio with his brother Edward. As Jackson explained, however, "Portrait photography never had any charms for me, so I sought my subjects from the house-tops,

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Date: 1886
Medium: Albumen silver print
Culture: American
Department: Photographs
Institution: Getty Museum
Object ID: ef2049e5-50b3-4f29-8ca4-e1ba8d64d647

From the Getty Museum record

On an especially sunny day in southwestern Colorado, William Henry Jackson stood beside the Rio de Las Animas Perdidas--River of Lost Souls--and pointed his camera slightly upward. From that position he photographed five individuals posed in front of a train making its way through a remote, rocky pass. This steep, craggy mountain was one of many into which workers carved roadbeds for railroad tracks. Piles of small chips lining the edge of the river below reveal that the workers disposed of the waste by simply throwing it to the side. Railroads both promoted such engineering feats and united distant places, but Jackson referred to neither in titling his image. On a boulder in the bottom left corner, he merely wrote, "1077A, Cañon of the Rio Asanimas, W.H. Jackson, Denver, CO."

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