Jack Hillers

Hillers, Jack (1843-1925), German-American government photographer. An immigrant from Hanover, Hillers fought for the Union in the Civil War and in May 1871 met the explorer and anthropologist John Wesley Powell (1834-1902), eventually director of two federal agencies, the Bureau of Ethnology (1879) and the US Geological Survey (1881). Powell hired him as a boatman for an expedition down the Green and Colorado rivers, but a year later appointed him the expedition's photographer. On this and many subsequent expeditions Hillers took superb wet-plate views of the Grand Canyon and other locations in the desert West and south-west; and, in 1892, of the Yosemite Valley. Powell, increasingly interested in Native American culture, also commissioned many pictures, some straightforwardly ethnographic, others more contrived, of Native American tribes, including the Southern Paiutes (who named Hillers Myself in the Water), the Hopis, and the pueblo-dwellers of Arizona and New Mexico, most notably at Zuni. Back in Washington, DC, he made portraits of hundreds of visiting Indian delegates. Hillers's pictures were widely exhibited and published in his lifetime, and are mostly preserved in the National Archives and the Smithsonian Institution.

— Robin Lenman

Bibliography

• Fowler, D. D., Myself in the Water: The Western Photographs of John K. Hillers (1989)