Boosting the West

In a career lasting almost 60 years, Joseph Stimson promoted Wyoming and other Western states in strong and spirited photographs. He was not the West’s first photographer, nor its most artistic, but his work perfectly expressed the optimism and belief in progress of this area in the early twentieth century.

Stimson started as a portrait photographer in 1889, and was later hired by the Union Pacific Railroad to publicize its huge, costly operation. He went on to take promotional pictures for businesses and industries, and to boost tourism for the state. When he died in 1952, Wyoming’s State Archives, Museums and Historical Department bought all his 7500 existing photographs—most of them from glass-plate negatives. Mark Junge has selected 227 of them for his forthcoming J. E. Stimson: Photographer of the West, from which our portfolio is drawn. The book will be published soon by the University of Nebraska Press.

—B.K.