288 pgs. B & W | $35.00 hardcover | W & A: Bill Griffith
The creator of Zippy the Pinhead* might seem like an unlikely candidate to create a graphic biography of William Henry Jackson, a pioneer of outdoor photography in the Western United States. Well, it turns out that not only is Griffith’s narrative and artistic style well suited to the story he has to tell, he’s also the great grandson of his subject (his full name is William Henry Jackson Griffith). So a perfect match all around.
Griffith includes himself in the introduction to his story, from being a kid in Brooklyn learning about his famous great grandfather for the first time to his enrollment at Pratt Institute as a young adult. Then we cut to Jackson’s story, beginning in his old age (98) as he attends an exhibition including some of his photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Whatever else he may have been, Jackson seems to have been quite a character, someone who did pretty much what he wanted and whose life touched on many of the major events of his day.
Jackson was born in 1843 in Keeseville, New York, and grew up in an artistic family: his mother was a sketch artist and his father experimented with creating daguerreotypes. Jackson spent much of his free time sketching and learned the rudiments of anatomy and perspective from the American Drawing Book. At age 13 he began working as a typesetter and soon put his artistic talents to work creating display cards for a drug store and painting window screens (which were then all the rage). At 15 he began working in a photographer’s studio, then enlisted in the Union Army as a member of the Light Guard of Rutland, Vermont. After the war, he got engaged, but his fiancée called it off after an ill-considered display of pride on Jackson’s part.
Jackson then headed to New York City, then headed west. In St. Joseph, Missouri, he got hired as a bullwhacker (oxen driver) with a wagon train headed for Montana. There he encountered Native Americans, and although he considered himself a chronicler of their lives, his great grandson believes he was more of a participant in their destruction, as his photographs of wide-open spaces encouraged white people to claim these “empty” spaces for themselves. In 1869 (the same year the transcontinental railroad was completed), Jackson was commissioned by the Union Pacific to document the scenery along the rail lines, and in 1870 by a forerunner of the U.S. Geological Survey to photograph the Rocky Mountains and Yellowstone River. More commissions followed, along with even greater adventures like traveling the world to create photographs and collect specimens for the Field Museum in Chicago.
Griffith’s detailed, mostly realistic style lends itself well to a story that is loaded with adventures of the kind most people only dream of. He mixes up page layouts, so sometimes he uses frames or implied frames and sometimes creates more of an overall poster effect with one image leading into the next. His storytelling jumps forward and backward in time, and the specificity of his location choices, like setting conversations in a long-vanished automat in New York City, add to the historical interest of this work.
Photographic Memory includes a source list, notes, reproductions of 15 of Jackson’s photographs, and two maps: one of the Western United States in 1869, one of Jackson’s travels around the world. | Sarah Boslaugh
You can see a sample of the artwork for Photographic Memory here.
*Maybe a word we wouldn’t ordinarily use today (the medical term is microcephaly), but using a slur openly can take away its power—just ask the ghost of Dick Gregory. Plus Griffith’s Zippy is no dum dum—he’s more of a wise fool that speaks the truth and satirizes American culture from a position on the fringes of it. Griffith wrote a respectful biography of Schlitzie (Simon Metz), one of the pinheads featured in Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks, whose title makes his point of view clear: Nobody’s Fool.
