This bucolic scene is more characteristic of a leisure day of fishing with a friend taking a picture for a memento. In fact, it was produced by the Detroit Publishing Company with the express purpose of finding home and business markets for this and thousands of other images.

Launched as a photographic publishing firm in the late 1890's by two Detroit businessmen, William A. Livingstone Jr. and Edwin H. Husher, the Detroit Publishing Company purchased the negatives of a number of photographers. Its success, however, was in large part determined by the participation of accomplished American landscape photographer William Henry Jackson, who joined the firm in 1897.

Catalogs published by the company, provide documentation regarding the images and formats the firm offered to the public and the prices originally charged for them. The collection emphasizes the types of scenes consumers might have wished to frame and hang on their walls or to send to friends as postcards. It provides valuable clues to popular art works of the day that featured women, as well as to sites familiar to women of the leisure class.

Besides marketing images to individual consumers, it appears that the company photographed industrial plants and commercial firms, such as the National Cash Register Company and the advertising firm of the Whitney Warner Publishing Company, among many others.

The Library of Congress' Detroit Publishing Company Collection, is made up of 25,000 negatives, 20,000 photographic prints, and 2,900 transparencies, dated from the 1880's-1930. The Collection offers insight into the commerce of images at a scale of production completely different from that of the individual studio or a commercial photographer.

Medium : 1 photographic print

Created/Published : Between 1898 and 1914

Creator : Detroit Publishing Company

Part of the Detroit Publishing Company Collection housed in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress

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Product #: cph3b13384