Resources

Cultural Institutions and Photographic Depositories
Photographers
Railroad Photography
Print Resources

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Cultural Institutions and Photographic Depositories

Bancroft Library at University of California, Berkeley

A major focus of the Bancroft Library is its collection of documents relating to the history of western North America. The Western Americana collection was started by Hubert Howe Bancroft and includes collections on

Western Migration,
The Gold Rush,
Mining in the West, and its Demographic Consequences,
Land Surveys and Scientific Expeditions

Additionally they have a digital collection of cased photographs including daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, many from the Gold Rush Era, 1848-1865.

Beinecke Library at Yale University

Yale University’s Beinecke Library (New Haven, CT) has a large Western Americana collection, which includes printed materials of various types documenting the exploration, settlement and development of the area west of the Mississippi. Finding aides of stereoviews can be found through this catalog. Collections of interest to this document include:

Boston Public Library

Boston Public Library has digitized Alexander Gardner’s “Across the Continent on the Kansas Pacific Railroad: Route of the 35th Parallel”. Gardner was official photographer for Kansas Pacific Railroad. The images can be seen on this Flickr Photostream

Denver Public Library

Denver Public Library has digitized over 80,000 items in their Western History Digital Collection including documents, maps, photos, and art.

History of the American West 1860-1920: Photographs from the Collection of the Denver Public Library Over 30,000 photographs, drawn from the holdings of the Western History and Genealogy Department at Denver Public Library.

George Eastman House

George Eastman House Notes on Photographs is a tool for communication among students, historians, collectors, curators, conservators, archivists, practitioners, and the interested public.

Library of Congress

Stereograph Cards Collection in the Library of Congress. Images produced from the 1850s to the 1940s, with the bulk of the collection dating between 1870 and 1920.

National Archives

Photographs of the American West, 1861-1912 includes photographs from Federal bureaus and offices including the Geological Survey photos by Timothy O’Sullivan and William H. Jackson.

New York Public Library

New York Public Library Digital Gallery. Early Landscape Photography of the American West. 200+ albumen prints from 1860s to 1870s. Photos by Watkins, A.J. Russell, Timothy O’Sullivan, William Bell, and William Henry Jackson.

Smithsonian Institution

The Smithsonian’s online gallery of the first 100 years of photography, Smithsonian American Photographs: The First Century

Southern Methodist University

A digital collection of photographs, images, albums and more has been compiled by SMU and can be seen at U.S. West: Photographs, Manuscripts & Imprints. The DeGolyer Library has over 500,000 photos in their collection including images made by Carleton Watkins, Andrew Russell, Alexander Gardner, William Henry Jackson, John Hillers, Charles Roscoe Savage, F. Jay Haynes, Edward Curtis, Robert Benecke and Laura Gilpin.

USGS Photographic Library

The USGS Central Regional Library maintains a collection of over 400,000 photographs taken during geologic studies of the United States and its territories from 1868 to the present. Including a collection of Pioneer Photographers‘s images.

Photographers

Biographies

Mautz, Carl. Biographies of Western Photographers: A Reference Guide to Photographers Working in the 19th Century American West. Nevada City, Calif: Carl Mautz Pub, 1997. Print.

Palmquist, Peter E, and Thomas R. Kailbourn. Pioneer Photographers from the Mississippi to the Continental Divide: A Biographical Dictionary, 1839-1865. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2005. Print.

Palmquist, Peter, Guide to Peter Palmquist Collection, uncataloged. Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 2007, Web.

Peter Palmquist, a self-taught photography enthusiast, collected works and biographies of photographers working in western United States. This collection of work dates back to 1840 and includes 815 boxes and 320 volumes of information, most of it uncatalogued.

Woman Photographers

Peter Palmquist assembled information on nearly 2000 women photographers, initially of those working in California and eventually collecting biographical information on all women photographers internationally (circa 1840-2003). His papers are retained at the Beinecke Library at Yale University and includes amateur and professional photographers as well as those in ancillary fields such as studio assistants, retouchers, colorists, photojournalists and filmmakers.

Mason, Matthew & Geissler, Christopher. Guide to the Peter Palmquist Collection of Women in Photography. WA MSS S-2600. Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, May 2008, Web.

To complement this collection, a Catalog to Palmquist’s Women in Photography was established. This database allows the researcher to search by photograph title; full name and A/K/A of creater; nations, states and cities where worked.

Railroad Photography

Central Pacific Railroad Photography Museum

Union Pacific Railroad Gallery

Alexander Gardner(1821-1882) documented the construction of the Kansas Pacific Railroad line across the 35th parallel. Flickr PhotoStream of Gardner’s railroad photography.

Alfred A. Hart (1816-1908)- official photographer for Central Pacific Railroad. Hart the western half of the first transcontinental railroad, for which he took 364 historic stereoviews of the railroad construction in the 1860s. Hart sold his negatives to Carleton Watkins, who continued to publish the CPRR stereoviews in the 1870s.(1866)

University of Nevada, Reno Library Special Collections, Hart Stereoviews

Andrew J. Russell (1830-1902). Russell was the official photographer of the eastern half of the first transcontinental railroad.

Union Pacific Railroad A.J. Russell Photos

A.J. Russell Slideshow

Oakland Museum of California A.J. Russell Collection

Great West Illustrated in a Series of Photographic Views Across the Continent: a leather-bound album of fifty albumen prints published in 1869 by A.J. Russell has been digitized Boston Public Library and can be viewed at this Flickr Photostream

Charles Roscoe Savage (1832-1909)- British born photographer who had a portrait studio in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Brigham Young University Harold B. Lee Library Digital Collections

Print Resources

Articles

Lundberg, Ann E. “The Ruin of a Bygone Geological Empire”: Clarence King and the Place of the Primitive in the Evolution of American Identity.” ATQ 18.3 (2004): 179-203. Print.

Wickliff, Gregory A. “Geology, photography, and environmental rhetoric in the American West of 1860-1890.” Technical Communication Quarterly 6.1 (1997):35 pag. Web. 2 February 2011

Books

Bartlett, Richard A. Great Surveys of the American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962. Print.[1]

Clee, Paul. Photography and the Making of the American West. North Haven, Conn: Linnet Books, 2003. Print. [2]

Davis, Keith F, Jane L. Aspinwall, and Marc F. Wilson. The Origins of American Photography: From Daguerreotype to Dry-Plate, 1839-1885. Kansas City, Mo: Hall Family Foundation, 2007. Print. [3]

Dimock, George, and Carleton E. Watkins. Exploiting the View: Photographs of Yosemite & Mariposa by Carleton Watkins. North Bennington, Vt: Park-McCullough House, 1984. Print. [4]

Goetzmann, William H. Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West. New York: Knopf, 1966. Print. [5]

Hannavy, John. Encyclopedia of Nineteenth Century Photography. London: Routledge, 2008. Print. [6]

Lyden, Anne M. Railroad Vision: Photography, Travel, and Perception. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2003. Print. [7]

Meisel, Max. A Bibliography of American Natural History: The Pioneer Century, 1769-1865. New York: Hafner Pub. Co, 1967. Print. [8]

Naef, Weston J., and J. Paul Getty Museum. Carleton Watkins in Yosemite. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008. Print. [9]

Nickel, Douglas R., et al. Carleton Watkins : The Art of Perception. San Francisco, Calif.: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1999. Print. [10]

Palmquist, Peter E., Carleton E. Watkins , and Amon Carter Museum of Western Art. Carleton E. Watkins, Photographer of the American West. Albuquerque: Published for the Amon Carter Museum by the University of New Mexico Press, 1983. Print. [11]

Phillips, Sandra S. Crossing the Frontier: Photographs of the Developing West, 1849 to the Present. San Francisco, Calif: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1996. Print. [12]

Sandweiss, Martha A. Print the Legend : Photography and the American West. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Print. [13]

Taft, Robert,. Photography and the American Scene; a Social History, 1839-1889. New York: Dover Publications, 1964. Print. [14]

Truettner, William H, and Nancy K. Anderson. The West As America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920. Washington: Published for the National Museum of American Art by the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. Print. [15]

Watkins, Carleton E, Weston J. Naef, and Christine Hult-Lewis. Carleton Watkins: The Complete Mammoth Photographs. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011. Print. [16]

Watkins, Carleton E., and J. Paul Getty Museum. In Focus-Carleton Watkins : Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum. Los Angeles: The Museum, 1997. Print. [17]