Jackson drawing, American Southwest, 1947 Photograph of drawing by J.B. Jackson, Collection of J.B, Jackson Pictorial Materials from Various Sources, 1940-1990, 000-866-1-T2-01.

As a Master of Fine Art graduate student in studio art at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, I worked as the Architecture and Design Fellow in the special collections at the Center for Southwest Research (CSWR). My position provided me with a great variety of work from processing collections to creating online Research Guides to writing Encoded Archival Description to co-curating archival exhibitions. The J.B. Jackson collections had the most impact on me.

The Center for Southwest Research holds four Jackson collections:

• J.B. Jackson Papers
• J.B. Jackson Pictorial Collection separated from the papers
• J.B. Jackson Pictorial Collection from various sources
• J.B. Jackson Textual Materials from various sources
   

The different collections exist due to multiple donors over the years and the variety of material formats that include drawings, photographs, slides, letters, notes, and manuscripts, as well as several boxes of trinkets. Organizing and arranging Jackson’s material for researchers and exhibition viewers became one of my greatest learning experiences in graduate school and his work influenced my own art practice.

Cultural geographer, John Brinckerhoff (J.B.) Jackson was known for his historical and theoretical ideas on landscape studies. He lived from 1909-1996 and had a home in La Cienega, New Mexico, approximately 20 miles south of Santa Fe. After graduating from Harvard skeptical of academia, he served in World War II as a field intelligence officer. There he studied the landscape of Europe through extensive aerial imagery, mapping, and sketches to keep his troops safe. He analyzed the way that people used the land,  sparking his unique approach to looking at landscape.

His experiences with landscape analysis in the war led him to found a magazine based in Santa Fe in 1951 called Landscape. When he started the magazine, Jackson was the sole writer and editor, but wrote articles from different points of view under different pseudonyms. After the first few issues, other writers contributed and he no longer needed to write as other people. That initial decision to use creative license shows his unorthodox approach to his work. He was the editor until 1968, succeeded by Blair Boyd until its last issue in 2005.

Jackson in the office of Jacques Simon, Paris, 1979 Photo sent to Blair Boyd, then editor of the magazine Jackson founded called Landscape, by Courtney R. Jones. Photograph of J.B. Jackson, Collection of J.B. Jackson Pictorial Materials from Various Sources, 1940-1990, 000-866-11-001

Landscape cover, Autumn 1952 Landscape Magazine, bound, University of New Mexico Libraries, G1.L2 c.1

The Jackson collections have several original drawings. In his sketch from 1947, notice that he didn’t focus on idealized scenery, but rather he drew the road and power lines. In his work, he emphasized the built environment and what it says about our culture. He coined the term “vernacular landscape,” which means looking at the common, everyday, local landscape including infrastructure.

Jackson drawing, American Southwest, 1947 Photograph of drawing by J.B. Jackson, Collection of J.B, Jackson Pictorial Materials from Various Sources, 1940-1990, 000-866-1-T2-01.

Semi-trucks in the desert Photograph by J.B. Jackson, Collection of J.B, Jackson Pictorial Materials from Various Sources, 1940-1990, 000-866-3-I-06 .

Parking, Oakland, California, 1971, Collection of J.B, Jackson Pictorial Materials from Various Sources, 1940-1990, 000-866-2-I-05 .

Most of the images included in this article are from his teaching slides that he used to teach one course at Harvard one semester and one course at UC Berkeley the other semester each year. He would lecture for about 45 minutes and then show 5-7 slides to support what he was discussing at the end of his talk. For the rest of the year, he traveled around taking snapshots of landscape around the country and returned to his home in New Mexico.

In the J.B. Pictorial Collections from Various Sources collection, there are over 3,200 of his teaching slides from landscape scholars who taught after Jackson: Paul Groth, Chris Wilson, and Marc Treib whom Jackson gave slides to at different times and in different quantities. I wrote descriptive metadata for over 500 of them, so I spent a lot of time with the images researching and thinking about them.

Jackson also had a personal logic to the organization of his slides, much to the frustration of his former teaching assistant and later professor and  slide organizer, Paul Groth. Jackson would store books on top of the slides and routinely move them around in the sleeves to be the way he needed to use them in the moment. Part of my job was to make some sense of the slide organization according to archival standards while also preserving Jackson’s order for researchers using Groth’s notes.

Parking, Oakland, California, 1971 Photograph by J.B. Jackson, Collection of J.B, Jackson Pictorial Materials from Various Sources, 1940-1990, 000-866-2-I-05

Jackson had a fine eye for composition but didn’t prize himself on perfect photography. Many images are blurry, scratched, or have a thumb in the corner that would traditionally be considered “bad” images. But they are indicative of how he was thinking about his experience of the landscape and the way we shape it. Like photographers Steven Shore and William Eggleston, who both rose to public attention working around the same time in the 1970s, Jackson made snapshot photographs of the commonplace. The “wrong” things in a picture convey immediacy of experience.

Jackson never considered himself an artist but he was versed in contemporary art. In the Fine Arts Library at University of New Mexico is the J.B. Jackson study room that includes his personal collection of books that were on his shelves at the time he passed. One of the books in Jackson’s collection is “Thirty-Four Parking Lots” by Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha with Jackson’s name handwritten on the front. As seen in his teaching slides, both Jackson and Ruscha looked at the space of a parking lot in similar ways.

Jackson associated with many people in the art world as well, including the abstract expressionist painter Nell Sinton. The two became lifetime friends. Reading those intimate letters in the Textual Materials collection gave me insight into Jackson’s humor and personality in the candid way he shared his feelings with Sinton. He would have known the work of Marcel Duchamp who became famous for his “Fountain” of 1917, the urinal that the artist signed. Duchamp brought this everyday, overlooked item into the gallery and changed perspective on it while provoking and poking fun at the highbrow art crowd for thinking art is only the greatest achievements of mankind and not part of regular, mundane life. This work laid the foundation for later artists like Andy Warhol.

Industry in the landscape, Wyoming, 1973 Photograph by J.B. Jackson, Collection of J.B, Jackson Pictorial Materials from Various Sources, 1940-1990, 000-866-5-J-07 .

Fenced pile of golden dirt, 1976 Photograph by J.B. Jackson, Collection of J.B, Jackson Pictorial Materials from Various Sources, 1940-1990, 000-866-5-J-14 .

Oil derricks, Long Beach, 1970 Photograph by J.B. Jackson, Collection of J.B, Jackson Pictorial Materials from Various Sources, 1940-1990, 000-866-5-I-07.

What Duchamp did for the art world, J.B. Jackson did for landscape studies. He brought attention and scholarship to the field of architecture and geography through serious inquiry into structures like gas stations, mobile homes, parking lots, the highway, and extraction industry. Jackson considered the relationship between the natural and built environment as a key to his observations on our cultural environment. In the discussion of landscape, Jackson included industry in the west. Fake islands off the coast of Long Beach, California conceal oil rigs that fuel our transportation culture hidden in these romanticized ideas of tropical islands that speak to our capitalist obsession with vacation. All of these marks on the land give us insight to ourselves as a culture, to how and why we shape the landscape the way we do.

J.B. Jackson writes in his book of essays Necessity for Ruins (1980), “Art also belongs with landscape studies as I interpret them, for it is only when we begin to participate emotionally in a landscape that its uniqueness and beauty are revealed to us.”

To work with his personal items first-hand, I felt like I knew him despite the fact that he died when I was still in high school and I had never heard of him before working as an archival fellow. Some of the weirdest personal items in the Jackson papers were trinkets added in 2011 by Jackson’s friend and prominent scholar Helen Horowitz. These trinkets decorated his fireplace mantle displayed as a jumble that include an American flag paper plate, a paper dragon, a New Mexico tourist collectible plate, bells, a wooden bear, and other similar items. The items seem like Americana junk, but it

Highway construction, N.M., 1971 Photograph by J.B. Jackson, Collection of J.B, Jackson Pictorial Materials from Various Sources, 1940-1990, 000-866-2-K-06 .

gives insight to his sense of humor, his appreciation for the lowbrow, everyday culture of Americans, and into the scholar as a person.

Jackson asked us to look at landscape differently through his exceedingly creative intellectual approach. Visual artists can use archival materials in similar, unique ways. I used these collections not only for visual and information research while I archived them, but also searched for conceptual ideas to expand my own. As artists, we glean ideas from disparate sources that feed our art practices in context with contemporary thought and transform those ideas into something else.

Learn more about Jackson with the Research Guide Fussell created as part of her fellowship.

Jackson in a pink sweater and red pants, La Cienega, N.M.,1978 Photograph by Michael Laurie, Collection of J.B, Jackson Pictorial Materials from Various Sources, 1940-1990, 000-866-11-023 .

All images courtesy of the Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico Libraries.

Erin Fussell is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and MLIS candidate who lives and works in Greater Los Angeles.

(right) Fussell, (un)performance still, 2016