Henry Hamilton Bennett

From a Local Studio to the Wisconsin Dells

Henry Hamilton Bennett was born in Farnham, Canada East, in 1843 and moved to Wisconsin with his father in 1857. He served in the Civil War and sustained an arm injury that made a return to carpentry difficult. In 1865 he purchased a portrait studio in Kilbourn City.^*21 His move into photography brought together an interest in the local landscape and the practical need for a new livelihood after his injury. ^*1

Because the local market for portraiture was limited, Bennett expanded his subjects to the Wisconsin River and its rock formations. He transported equipment by boat and, using heavy cameras during the transition from wet to dry plates, photographed sites that were not easily accessible to tourists. The Wisconsin Historical Society documents how photography, sales, and invention developed together within the same studio business.^*2

A story centered only on the success of a lone inventor obscures the conditions of family labor. PBS Wisconsin notes that by around 1868 Bennett’s wife, Frances (“Frankie”), was handling much of the portrait-studio work, allowing him to spend more time photographing landscapes along the river.^*15 The division of labor that sustained the local studio also made Bennett’s extended landscape series possible.

Bennett also relied on support beyond his family. Sara Rath’s research traces how Milwaukee businessman William H. Metcalf provided emotional, financial, and artistic support that helped sustain the studio and landscape photography during the 1870s.^*26 The long-term project of photographing the Dells depended on a local network of family labor, financing, friendship, and sales as well as Bennett’s own inventions.

The Getty Museum emphasizes the role of Bennett’s photographs in visualizing the Dells as a form of “wilderness” that could be visited safely and in helping to establish regional tourism.^*3 The photographs recorded existing scenery, but they also worked as advertisements that taught distant viewers what to look at and which rock formations should be understood as named attractions.

Why Stereography Mattered

The rock formations of the Dells overlap in several spatial layers: foreground rock, river surface, and distant cliffs. Stereographs, viewed as paired images through a dedicated viewer, intensified this depth and were therefore particularly suited to marketing the landscape. Research at the RISD Museum analyzes Bennett’s stereographs as a “simulated tour” that directed the viewer’s gaze into the site as a substitute for travel.^*4

By the 1880s Bennett had cataloged large numbers of stereocards by number, enabling tourists and distant buyers to collect the attractions in sequence.^*2 His business and visual method both depended on movement through an entire region by following a series. A single photograph was one stop within that larger sequence.

The Museum of Wisconsin Art likewise notes that railroad companies purchased Bennett’s photographs in quantity and used them to promote tourism.^*13 Transportation infrastructure brought visitors to the Dells while photographs circulated images of the destination in advance, creating a cycle through which the output of a local studio reached tourists far beyond the region.

Stand Rock and the Visual Proof of an Instant

In Bennett’s best-known photograph, Leaping the Chasm (Stand Rock), his son Ashley is suspended in midair during an 1886 jump from one rock to another.^*5 According to the Wisconsin Historical Society, Bennett developed a high-speed shutter in 1886 and used it to arrest motion in this photograph and in the Raftsman’s Series.^*2

Here instantaneous photography records a prepared demonstration. The action was planned for the camera, not encountered by chance. The scene was arranged around an unmistakable bodily action that could show any viewer that the apparatus had truly isolated a short interval of time. The leap establishes the scale of the landscape and simultaneously acts as a visual test of the camera’s performance.

At the same time,Eadweard Muybridgewas analyzing motion through sequential photographs, whereas Bennett joined a “frozen instant” to a tourist landscape within a single image. Getty material on the history of photography likewise treats the suspended jump as emblematic of Bennett’s technical experimentation.^*17

Selling Landscape and Tourist Experience as the Same Product

In Bennett’s work, names of rock formations, camera locations, stereocard numbers, and sales catalogs function together. Landscape became a set of specific attractions that a buyer could follow in order, giving the general category of “beautiful nature” a named and sequenced itinerary. Tourism scholarship argues that his photographs helped construct a visual itinerary directing urban audiences toward a regional destination.^*12

Educational material from PBS Wisconsin likewise explains the relationship among photography, railroads, tourism advertising, and the growing fame of the Dells.^*15 Another PBS program describes how the technical work and commercial activity of a local photographer became connected to the formation of a regional brand.^*16

The question of why Bennett used these forms therefore includes both technique and methods of sale. Stereography produced depth, numbered series created itineraries, instantaneous photographs advertised technical novelty, and the studio circulated all of them as souvenirs. Visual form and the regional economy were inseparable in his work.

Geographer Steven Hoelscher argues that Bennett’s stereographs and large panoramas recast a “working river” shaped by logging and rafting as a picturesque tourist space for the Victorian middle class.^*24 From this perspective, photographs of rocks and gorges can also be read as tourist images that selected what counted as nature worth seeing while leaving much of the landscape’s industrial use outside the frame.

The Raftsman’s Series and Disappearing Labor

Alongside scenic attractions, Bennett photographed the raftsmen who transported timber on the Wisconsin River. The Raftsman’s Series preserves a form of river labor declining with the expansion of the railroad, showing workers, rafts, and the structure of the river within the same images.^*6

Within Bennett’s catalog, spectacular rock formations sold to tourists appear alongside the physical labor that sustained the regional economy. The photographs show that landscapes marketed as untouched nature were already embedded in histories of logging, transportation, and commerce.

The Rotating Solar Printing Apparatus and Mass Production

Bennett improved printing as well as camera equipment. The Wisconsin Historical Society describes inventions that supported studio production, including a rotating solar printing house that tracked sunlight while printing from multiple negatives.^*2

Selling photographs widely as tourist commodities required more than a successful exposure. The same image had to be reproduced reliably on demand, numbered, and managed as inventory. The preserved H. H. Bennett Studio is itself open as a site of photographic production, including camera rooms, darkrooms, sales spaces, and machinery.^*18

Ho-Chunk Portraits and the Tourist Gaze

Bennett also photographed many Ho-Chunk people living in and around the Dells. Portraits such as Portrait of a Ho-Chunk Woman preserve an individual face and clothing with clarity, but these images also circulated as stereocards and souvenirs for white tourists.^*7

The presentation of Indigenous culture as tourist programming in the Dells continued after Bennett’s death. A 1959 photograph of the Stand Rock Indian Ceremonial, held from 1919 to 1997, shows Ho-Chunk dancers together with the surrounding audience seating.^*8 Made long after Bennett’s death, the 1959 photograph documents the persistence into the twentieth century of a tourist structure in which Indigenous culture became a staged attraction in the Dells. A 1912 photograph of Bennett’s studio, also made after his death, shows Native American objects displayed as souvenirs and exhibition material, preserving a commercial space where photographs of Ho-Chunk people were sold within the tourist economy.^*9

Recent scholarship argues that these photographs cannot be understood only as unilateral images of a “vanishing people.” Research discussed by the University of Texas examines cases in which Ho-Chunk sitters rejected or negotiated clothing choices, demonstrating that photographed subjects exercised judgment at the point of production.^*10

Another study by Hoelscher analyzes the photographing of Indigenous people in the Dells between 1866 and 1907 as an “encounter” among tourism, power, and the camera.^*25 The research therefore suggests that Bennett’s Ho-Chunk photographs were commodities shaped by tourists’ expectations of the “Indian,” the photographer’s commercial decisions, and the responses of the people photographed, not unilateral ethnographic documents produced by the photographer alone.

Behind these tourist images lies the history of the Ho-Chunk being repeatedly forced from Wisconsin during the nineteenth century and continuing to return and live in the region.^*23 A review in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Hoelscher’s research emphasizes that Bennett’s photographs left dispossession and poverty outside the frame while commodifying the “vanishing Indian” desired by tourists. At the same time, Ho-Chunk participants used income from photography in everyday life and exerted influence over clothing and poses.^*22 Defining these images solely through the photographer’s colonial gaze would therefore miss the ways photographed people used the photographic economy and acted to sustain their culture and everyday lives.

Picturing Indians situates Indigenous photography in Wisconsin within a broader history of tourism, ethnography, and the construction of regional identity.^*11 Bennett’s photographs cannot be separated from those power relations and treated simply as pictures of local custom.

Conservation and the Contradiction of “Visit-able Wilderness”

Bennett’s landscape photographs publicized the geological value of the Dells and contributed to local conservation awareness, while the same images also functioned as commercial promotion designed to attract visitors.^*3 From an early stage, his landscape photographs contained the tension of visualizing nature both as something to preserve and as a destination to consume.

A rereading from Ho-Chunk perspectives further complicates the archive. Picturing Indians places Bennett’s photographs alongside the work of contemporary Ho-Chunk photographer Tom Jones and examines traces of injury, humor, pride, and resistance that remain in historical images.^*22 Bennett’s archive can thus support criticism of Indigenous images produced for a white tourist industry while also offering material through which to reconsider the survival strategies and self-presentation of the people photographed.

The Wisconsin Historical Society’s preservation of the H. H. Bennett Studio and its updating of interpretation to include Ho-Chunk history show that his legacy cannot end with a success story about an inventive photographer.^*14 The work is now being reconsidered in terms of how photography helped create a tourist destination and whose land was sold through which narratives.

Bennett across Technical History, Tourism, and Ho-Chunk Images

The Library of Congress holds multiple photographs by Bennett, preserving regional commercial photography as part of the national historical record of the medium.^*20 The Wisconsin Historical Society’s collection allows landscapes, portraits, studio material, and equipment to be studied together as parts of the same photographer’s archive.^*19

Bennett’s place in photographic history lies at the intersection of regional landscape photography, technical history, tourism, and commerce. Stereography offered an experience of depth, instantaneous exposure demonstrated the capabilities of equipment, numbered cards and mass-production systems distributed images widely, and railroad advertising linked those images directly to travel. Photography became both a record of place and a medium for making people want to visit it. John Szarkowski’s 1963 reassessment of Bennett as an important nineteenth-century American landscape photographer also shows how regional commercial photography was later incorporated into a museum-centered history of the medium.^*21

At the same time, an archive that includes portraits of Ho-Chunk people demands scrutiny of whom tourist photography makes visible and in what terms. Reading Bennett today requires technical invention, scenic beauty, commercial success, and colonial forms of looking to be held within the same photographic history.