Travel

Tourism as we know it is a product of the railroad and the steamship. Before them, travel for pleasure was slow, expensive and mostly limited to the wealthy. By the late 1800s a middle-class family could take a train to the seashore, the mountains or Niagara Falls, and they wanted pictures to bring home.

Publishers rushed to meet that demand. Stereographs, pairs of photographs that looked 3-dimensional through a viewer, sold by the millions and let people tour Egypt or Yosemite from the parlor. Postcards came next and became a national craze in the early 1900s.

The Detroit Publishing Company made some of the most striking travel images of the period. It used a Swiss process called photochrom to turn black-and-white negatives into color prints, with the colors added by skilled workers using a series of printing stones. The firm worked with the photographer William Henry Jackson, who had made his name photographing the West, and it produced views of resort hotels, scenic railroads, city streets and natural wonders across the country and abroad. The colors are not quite real, but they are close, and they give a vivid sense of how these places looked.

Railroads and steamship lines were among the biggest promoters of travel, because they sold the tickets. They published posters, brochures and guidebooks that made their routes look glamorous. The great resort hotels of the period, often built by the railroads themselves, appear in these pictures with wide porches full of guests in rocking chairs.

Look at the tourists in these images. They are usually dressed far more formally than travelers today, with hats, jackets and long skirts even on a mountain trail. Look also for the guides, porters and local people who appear at the edges. They were part of the trip too, even if the picture was not taken for them.