Artists

American, born in England
1830 - 1910

Bell served both in the Mexican War (1846–1848) and the American Civil War. Subsequently, Bell was head photographer of the Army Medical Museum in Washing-ton, DC. In 1872, he replaced head photographer Timothy O’Sullivan on the United States Geological Survey and traveled to Arizona where he made striking photographs of the Grand Canyon. Bell later photographed for the Pennsylvania Railroad and for an expedition to Patagonia. He experimented with techniques from early daguerreo- types to film in a career that lasted over 60 years.

American
1853 - 1921

Haynes was a photographic entrepreneur. After starting his own business in Minnesota in 1876, he worked as a photographer for the Northern Pacific Railroad (1876), the Canadian Pacific Railway (1881), and the Puget Sound and Alaska Steam Ship line (1891) to promote tourism. Haynes also operated a studio in Fargo, North Dakota, and, from 1884, traveled for over twenty years across the northwest in a Pullman  railroad car which he modified into a gallery and darkroom, the “Haynes Palace Studio.” In 1882, Haynes first traveled to Yellowstone where he later established a studio and gallery to sell views to tourists. His son continued the business until the 1960s.

American, born in Germany
1843 - 1925

Hillers arrived in the United States in 1852 and served in the American Civil War. In 1871, he became boatman on geologist and ethnologist John Wesley Powell’s survey near the Colorado River. After learning photography, Hillers documented landscapes and Native American people in the Southwest from 1872–1879, mainly Ute, Navajo, and Hopi. When Powell was appointed the first director of the United States Bureau of Ethnology, Hillers became chief photographer here and at the United States Geological Survey, a joint position he held until his death in 1925.

American
1843 - 1942

Known as an accomplished explorer and photographer, Jackson’s exposure to visual arts and photography started in his childhood. His father was an amateur daguerreotypist and his mother painted. After serving as a staff artist and mapmaker in the American Civil War, Jackson set out for the American West, settling as a photographer in Omaha, Nebraska. He made over 2,000 prints of Native Americans, especially the Pawnee and Omaha tribes, and 10,000 photographs along the route of the Union Pacific Railroad. Jackson took part in a number of expeditions under Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, and, with painter Thomas Moran, worked to document an area of Wyoming that later became the Yellowstone National Park.

Norwegian
1832 - 1915

After a childhood and youth preparing to be a tradesman and fruit grower, Knudsen operated a successful portrait studio in Bergen from 1864. He is best known for photographs made during decades of traveling the length and width of Norway, depicting landscapes, folk life, towns, hotels, ships, roads and railways. Thousands of images still exist, enabling us to see how Knudsen experimented with viewpoints and framing over time. Knudsen sold his photographs in book shops, through leading tourist hotels, and by international commission. From around 1898, Knudsen’s nephew Knud Digranes ran the photography business. Knud Knudsen’s archive of almost 14,000 glass negatives and thousands of prints is part of Norges documentary, the Norwegian national heritage archive.

Swedish
1841 - 1906

In 1865, Lindahl opened his first photographic studio in Uddevalla, Sweden. From the 1870s, he traveled and photographed along the same routes as his Norwegian colleague Knud Knudsen, while also keeping a business as a studio photographer in Sweden. Lindahl sometimes photographed on commission, for example for the tourist agency Beyers, and many of his images appear as illustrations in travel guides. While Knudsen has been the subject of much scholarly attention, less has been written on Lindahl, and photo historians are still unsure who photographed particular views first. The younger photographer Anders Beer Wilse later acquired Lindahl’s archive of negatives and included them in his own sales catalogue, ensuring that Lindahl’s views were sold and seen long after his career ended.

American, born in Norway
1865 - 1929

Though born in Bergen, Monsen is virtually unknown in Norway. The son of a photographer, he emigrated to Utah Territory with his parents at three years old. Monsen worked with photographer William Henry Jackson and served in the military campaign that led to the capture of Geronimo in 1886. Monsen was a photographer for an 1889 expedition with the goal to construct a railroad line between Grand Junction, Colorado and San Diego, California, during which three men died in the Grand Canyon. Monsen survived and photographed Death Valley (1893), the Yosemite (1896), and the Southwest (1890s–1900s). He also established a San Francisco studio that was in operation until the 1906 earthquake, when most of his images were destroyed. Monsen is best known for his relatively candid and seemingly intimate photographs of Native Americans.

English
1830 - 1904

Muybridge emigrated to the United States in 1850, returned to England after a stagecoach crash in 1860, and moved back to San Francisco in 1867. Like photographers Carleton Watkins and Charles Leander Weed, he photographed the Yosemite Valley with a mammoth-plate camera. Commissioned by the U.S. government, Muybridge photographed the Tlingit Native Americans in Alaska in 1868. He is best known for his pioneering work in photographing animal locomotion, and made more than 100,000 images for the University of Pennsylvania where his work influenced the well-known painter and photographer Thomas Eakins.

Norwegian
1825 - 1897

Pihl started his career at sea but quickly turned his attention to land transportation and trained as a railway engineer in England. Back in Norway, he took up a range of roles working on the construction of roads, bridges and rail lines, and when the Norwegian State Railways was founded in 1883, Pihl was director of the railroad. Throughout his career, Pihl photographed rail construction projects and workmen crews, bridges, tunnels, and railroads cutting through the national landscapes of forests, valleys, and mountains. Pihl’s work as a photographer is little known, though he remains one of the most important figures in the history of Norwegian railways.

American, born in Ireland
1840 - 1882

O’Sullivan began his career in the popular portrait studios of Mathew Brady in New York and Washington, D.C and then became a Civil War photographer alongside Brady’s assistant Alexander Gardner. Later, O’Sullivan served as photographer for Clarence King’s Survey of the Fortieth Parallel (1867–1869 and 1872), a US Navy expedition to the Isthmus of Darien in Panama in 1870, and the Geographical Survey West of the One Hundredth Meridian under Lieutenant George M. Wheeler in 1871, 1873 and 1874. He made his most celebrated photographs – stunning views of the Grand Canyon, Canyon de Chelly and Shoshone Falls – during the King and Wheeler surveys.

American
1829 - 1902

Best known for his photographs of the railroad in the American West, Russell began his career serving the US Military Railroad Construction Corps during the Civil War, photographing railroad construction, military infrastructure, and equipment. Russell then worked for the Union Pacific Railroad and published his photographs from the area between Laramie, Wyoming and Salt Lake City, Utah in The Great West Illustrated in 1869 and, with Charles Savage, photographed the completion of the transcontinental railroad at Promontory Summit, Utah on May 10, 1869. In the 1870s and 1880s, Russell worked as a staff photographer for the popular magazine Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.

American, born in England
1832 - 1909

Savage’s career began in 1856 in New York, where he purchased photographic equipment with the hopes of earning enough money to venture West. Active in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Savage worked successfully in Salt Lake City as a portrait photographer and helped establish the Deseret Academy of Art. Savage traveled to San Francisco, New York, and Philadelphia to visit photographers, suppliers, and galleries to learn new photographic techniques. Engravings of his photographs were printed in Harper’s Weekly, and the Philadelphia Photographer published his travel account. In addition to scenes of Yellowstone and Zion National Parks, Savage made views that were sold by the Union Pacific Railroad and the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad.

Norwegian, born in Denmark
1818 - 1900

Born in Randers, Denmark, Selmer originally trained as a pharmacist and started experimenting with the daguerreotype technique around 1845. In 1852, he travelled to Norway, advertising as a portrait photographer. He remained in Bergen for the next 48 years, opening the city’s first permanent portrait studio in 1854. Selmer’s career encompassed all the leading photographic techniques and motif types of the nineteenth century, from unique portraits to mass-produced landscapes, property prospects, early news photography, and documentation of folklore, museum collections and medical conditions. In 1880, he was named Royal Photographer. Though one of Norway’s leading photographers for decades, very few original photographs by Selmer exist today.

American
1829 - 1916

In 1858, Watkins opened a photography studio in San Francisco. He began photographing Yosemite in 1861. Watkins’s stunning photographs encouraged President Abraham Lincoln to preserve Yosemite as a park in 1864. Watkins also made photographs for the California State Geological Survey (1864 and 1865), photographed the scenery along the Willamette and Columbia Rivers for the Oregon Steam Company (1867), documented mining operations for the Las Mariposas Mines, and photographed the Central and Southern Pacific Railroads. He lost his negatives in the San Francisco earthquake fire in 1906.

American
1824 - 1903

In 1859 Weed photographed Yosemite Valley, two years before photographer Charles Watkins. Weed returned to Yosemite in 1864 and made mammoth-plate prints and a series of stereo views. The photography firm Lawrence and Houseworth published and marketed Weed’s photographs from Yosemite for a growing tourist industry. Weed also documented mining sites in California and later traveled to Hong Kong, China, and Japan, and took mammoth plates of the volcanoes in Hawaii.

Norwegian
1865 - 1949

Wilse became a seaman at the age of 13 before emigrating to the United States in 1884. Working first as a railroad engineer and then as a cartographer, he learned photography and bought a part in a photographic business in Seattle in 1897. The following year he was the cartographer and photographer on an expedition to the area around Yellowstone National Park. After 16 years, Wilse returned to Norway in 1900 and embarked upon an extremely prolific career as a photographer of subjects such as landscapes, portraits, and documentation of trades. At the start of the twentieth century, Wilse became successful as a picture postcard photographer and public lecturer, holding over 800 illustrated public talks and publishing several books, among them Norway’s first “photo book,” Norske Vinterbilleder, in 1907. The Wilse Archive is part of Norges documentary, the Norwegian national heritage archive.