The Logic of the Copy

Photomechanical printmaking from the Center for Creative Photography

Exhibition Website

Dec 2 2017 - Apr 15 2018

Taking its title from a line in Photography’s Expanded Field, George Baker’s 2005 essay investigating the overlap between photography and related media, The Logic of the Copy will examine the ways in which photography’s marriage to printmaking contributed to the ubiquity of photographic images and gave rise to a lexicon that was adopted—and adapted—by successive generations of artists. In addition to numerous examples of pioneering photobooks, portfolios, and photographically illustrated print periodicals, the exhibition will include fine art prints by makers including William Henry Jackson, Edward S. Curtis, Alfred Stieglitz, Aaron Siskind, Lee Friedlander, Mark Klett, Robert Heinecken, Betty Hahn, Todd Walker, Tom Barrow, Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel, Andy Warhol, Sherrie Levine, and James Casebere.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.

Whether or not you go, William Henry Jackson's "The Pioneer Photographer,"  first published in 1929, is widely accepted as William Henry Jackson's most trusted autobiography of his early pioneering days and his first eight years as the official photographer for the U.S. Geological Survey. This reconstruction of Jackson's classic work, long out of print, presents 160 photographs and early drawings, paintings, and lithographs by America's best-known landscape photographer, drawing on Jackson's diaries, other published accounts, and his annotations of The Pioneer Photographer to create a complete and multidimensional view of the unfolding nineteenth-century American West. Editor Bob Blair has significantly expanded Jackson's original autobiography, reprinted here in full with the author's annotations, with seventy additional photographs, drawings, and paintings, and extensive excerpts from Jackson's writings, much of the new material drawn from archives and historical collections and never before published.

William Henry Jackson's "The Pioneer Photographer"

  • Works on Paper
  • American
  • William Henry Jackson
  • Edward S. Curtis
  • Alfred Stieglitz
  • Aaron Siskind
  • Lee Friedlander
  • Mark Klett
  • Robert Heinecken
  • Andy Warhol
  • and others

Exhibition Venues & Dates