Quarrying Granite for Mormon Temple, No. 119 from the series "Views in the Rocky Mountains"
1870/78
Medium
Albumen print, stereo
Dimensions
Each image: 9.4 × 7.6 cm (3 3/4 × 3 in.); Card: 10 × 17.6 cm (3 15/16 × 6 15/16 in.)
Classification
stereograph (albumen)
Department
Photography and Media
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
108772
Art Historical Context
William Henry Jackson’s “Quarrying Granite for Mormon Temple” (1870/78) captures the rugged labor behind one of the American West’s most ambitious building projects. As part of his celebrated series “Views in the Rocky Mountains,” the stereograph shows workers extracting stone destined for the Salt Lake Temple, then under construction in Utah Territory. Jackson, a pioneering expedition photographer, traveled with government surveys to document the landscapes and industries reshaping the frontier. The work is an albumen-print stereograph, a popular 19th-century format that paired two nearly id...