Detroit Publishing Company

Detroit Publishing was the largest producer of photographic views in the United States, and at its height it was printing seven million prints a year.

The business began around 1895 when a Detroit businessman acquired the American rights to the photochrom process, a Swiss method for producing color images from black-and-white negatives. William Henry Jackson, already the most celebrated landscape photographer in the country, joined the firm in 1897 and brought roughly ten thousand of his own negatives with him.

The firm collapsed for reasons worth knowing. The war cut off the Swiss printing arrangement, the halftone process made photographic reproduction cheap, and the Kodak put a camera in the hands of the traveler who had previously bought a view. All three arrived within a decade.

The photochrom process is worth understanding because it explains what these images are. A black-and-white negative was transferred to a series of lithographic stones, one for each color, and a skilled worker decided what those colors should be. The result is a color picture made without color film — the tones are an informed judgment rather than a measurement. Detroit Publishing employed colorists who had often never seen the places they were coloring, working from notes taken by the photographer.

The scale of the operation is hard to overstate. Detroit Publishing employed forty photographers, ran its own printing plant, and maintained a catalog running to tens of thousands of separate views. Salesmen worked territories the way a patent medicine company did, calling on drugstores and hotel lobbies and station newsstands with sample books.

The subjects are what a traveler would want on a wall or a postcard. Main streets and courthouse squares in hundreds of towns. Grand hotels. Beaches and boardwalks. National parks. Harbors. Railroad depots. Waterfalls. And a great many photographs of ordinary commercial streets, made because a local shop would buy them, which turns out to be the most valuable material in the whole collection.

Those street views are why this file matters more than its origins suggest. To sell a picture of a town, the firm had to photograph the town accurately — the shop signs, the awnings, the trolley lines, the people. So a Detroit Publishing view of a small city in 1905 is a better record of that place than anything made deliberately as documentation.

The company went into receivership in 1924, killed by the war, by cheaper printing methods, and by the arrival of the amateur camera. The negatives sat until the Library of Congress and the Colorado Historical Society acquired them decades later.

William Henry Jackson is the reason the landscape material is as good as it is. He had already spent twenty years photographing the West for the government surveys — he is the man whose Yellowstone pictures persuaded Congress to create the first national park — and he came to Detroit Publishing in his fifties with that entire body of work behind him. He then kept photographing for another quarter-century.

One thing to know when reading them. The same view was reissued for years, so the date on a print is when it was printed rather than when it was taken. The photograph may be twenty years older than the card it appears on.

Two Photographers, Fifty Years, Every Face in Washington