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Grand Canyon of the Colorado River

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: 1883
Medium: Albumen silver print
Culture: American
Department: Photographs
Institution: Getty Museum

After years of struggling to capture the grandeur of the Western landscape, William Henry Jackson made this sublime view of the Grand Canyon. Dwarfed by the enormous rocky outcropping below, above, and behind him, a man--probably a surveyor--looks through a telescope to the other side of the canyon. Clearly conveying the awe-inspiring scale of the Western landscape by contrasting human and natural scale, this image belongs to a tradition of landscape and expedition photography meant to elicit a strong emotional response.

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