Getty Museum
Old Aqueduct at Querétaro, Mexico
Creator
William Henry JacksonAmerican Photographer · 1843–1942
All works by this person →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,
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- about 1886
- Medium
- Albumen silver print
- Culture
- American
- Department
- Photographs
- Institution
- Getty Museum
Juxtaposing one engineering feat with another, William Henry Jackson made this photograph of a railroad engine passing beneath an arch of an aqueduct, sixty-nine feet high. The aqueduct, which provides water for the city of Querétaro in central Mexico, was built between 1726 and 1738, but the railroad did not arrive there until a hundred and fifty years later, in 1886. A close study of the image reveals a porter standing in the open doorway of the first car and a number of youthful passengers leaning out the windows of the rear car. In any city, the arrival of the railroad was invariably a cause for celebration; Jackson's photograph commemorates the introduction of this new method of transportation in the context of an earlier achievement.
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