Biography

The William Henry Jackson Photographs are a collection of images of Native Americans, dating from the mid 1800s and donated to the University of Iowa in the form of a set of photograph albums entitled Illustrations of Typical North American Indians. The contents of these albums are reflected in a catalogue entitled Descriptive Catalogue of Photographs of North American Indians. The history of the photographs and catalogue is an interesting story in and of itself, and enhances our understanding of the standard images of Native Americans that have appeared as commonplace illustrations in many publications.   The photographs themselves are the work of several photographers, while the catalogue of the photographs is the work of A. Zeno Shindler and William Henry Jackson. It is likely that the original photo albums, donated to the University of Iowa Libraries in the early 1900s, were purchased from one of nine copies of the Jackson Catalogue created by the Bureau of American Ethnology. The Jackson Catalogue is, however, problematic because additions to the images and multiple editors resulted in mistaken identification of illustrations and the loss of many of the photographers' credits.   The early history of the collection and the negatives provide an explanation for the problems inherent in it. The US government, which originally made paintings of visiting Indian delegates, began to photograph delegates when the new technology became readily available. Dr. Ferdinand Hayden of the US Geological Survey and Englishman William Blackmore, an amateur ethnologist, collected the negatives of these photographs and ultimately deposited them at the Smithsonian. A. Zeno Shindler was then contracted to produce a catalogue of 304 original images in 1869, entitled Photographic Portraits of North American Indians in the Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, and the Smithsonian mounted its exhibit of these images the same year. Shindler himself took some of the photographs that were included in this original catalogue, yet credit was not given to every contributing photographer. Copies of the images were widely circulated in major institutions, and they quickly formed the basis of Native American Photography collections in repositories and museums worldwide. As the catalogue circulated, entries were changed, and substitutions were made for original, damaged negatives.   The collection of negatives continued to grow as the US Government sponsored four important surveys of the American west during the 1870s. Photographer William Henry Jackson worked with these surveys, added negatives to the Smithsonian collection, and continued the cataloging work that Shindler had begun. In 1874, Jackson made a preliminary catalogue of over 1,000 images, which included most of the 300 images in the Shindler Catalogue and added other images taken during the surveys. Jackson grouped tribes under linguistic families, rather than alphabetically, and his descriptions included biographies, comments, and details about the subjects' physical stature. He expanded the catalogue in 1877. Not surprisingly, Jackson's work included all mistakes that were originally found in Shindler's catalogue.   The Jackson catalogue was viewed as a significant contribution to the field, and copies were circulated. The Smithsonian Bureau of American Ethnology continued to catalogue photographs, and in the 1980s, the data about the collections were computerized and placed online.   The original images held by the University of Iowa were donated by J. L. Pickard in the early 1900s. Originally in deteriorating scrapbook albums, the photographs required preservation. In the early 1990s, the photographs themselves were photographed, in order to create a visual finding aid for the collection. The originals were then re-mounted on acid free boards, covered with preservation mylar and stored in acid free boxes.

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