Photographic Memory by Bill Griffith

At this point, Bill Griffith is as much of a maker of comics biographies as he is a syndicated cartoonist, with four big, good books behind him over the past decade. [1] (I'm not going to judge how "underground cartoonist," the major phase for the first twenty or so years of his career, fits into it - it was clearly foundational to everything else.) So my remarking on the oddity of that transition, for the fourth time, would be too much.

Photographic Memory, Griffith's new book in 2025, is mostly a biography of his great-grandfather, the pioneering photographer William Henry Jackson. Since this is non-fiction, there must be an explanatory subtitle, in this case William Henry Jackson and the American West, which is not untrue, but leaves out the three-year round-the-world taking-pictures-of-railroads project Jackson was part of around the turn of the century, among other projects of his life. Jackson lived to 99, and, as Griffith shows us here, was active and working right up to the end, so it was not just a long life, but a full one.

Griffith doesn't structure Photographic Memory to be particularly inspiring, but Jackson's life is low-key inspiring. He started several businesses - all of which ran their course, leaving him to move on to other things - raised a family, did work he cared about for a long time, and had a small but mostly positive role in the history of his country. Add that to the "living to 99, on his own, writing and painting and photographing right up to the end" bit, and it's a model life.

Of course, Griffith is always present in his stories - that's the old undergrounder in him, knowing every story comes from a point of view, from a person - so Griffith himself is a minor character here, both in his youth, as a way into the story, and in his mature "Griffy" persona, as an author stand-in to bring up issues and questions and concerns. (And, in a surreal closing sequence, to mediate a dispute between Jackson and Yogi Bear - I don't think this entirely works, or quite fits with the tone of the rest of the book, but Griffith is clear why he did this, and it's positive and celebratory and silly, so I feel rude for quibbling.)

Griffith has a lot of Jackson's life to get through in Photographic Memory. He starts with his own childhood - he was born just two years after Jackson died - and, initially, it looks like the book will be structured through Griffith's family memories and artifacts of Jackson. But, pretty quickly, he moves to a different framing story: Jackson living in New York in the '30s and early '40s, writing his autobiography, making paintings, traveling out west every summer on the dime of the National Parks Service or the Oregon Trail Memorial Association, and, most centrally, talking with a young acolyte, Elwood Bonney, whose extensive diaries informed the book.

From there, he drops back to do the usual chronological story of Jackson's life, returning to Jackson-and-Bonney scenes regularly. Jackson was born in 1843 in upstate New York - his mother sketched and his father dabbled in very early photography. He went to work early in that 19th century way, setting type, painting, and working in an photography studio in his teens, before serving a stretch in the Army during the Civil War. (That seems to have been less eventful than many solders' enlistment, and ended, on good terms, before the war did - I wasn't aware that was possible at that time.) He was cruising onwards towards a comfortable life in his hometown in Vermont, working in a photography studio and heading towards marriage with a woman he loved, when he had a big breakup with that woman, Caddie Eastman.

Jackson sold off what he had, and immediately made plans to head west, to get away and maybe to seek his fortune in the silver mines. He did so in company with two friends, and the three worked as "bullwhackers" - the crew driving the oxen pulling wagons for caravans heading west through Montana in 1866.

After some adventures, and separating forever from those two friends - the West was huge, and trails diverged all the time - Jackson ended up in Denver, picking back up a photography career. The rest of his life followed a more usual model: marriage, children, business successes. He was hired to photograph various stunning natural features of the West, which turned into a pitch in Washington to found the National Parks system (starting with Yellowstone, which Jackson photographed extensively), and that in turn led to many more trips to photograph all sorts of things, largely for railroad companies, over the next four decades. Eventually, the taking-new-pictures part of the work subsided and Jackson's old photos found a new life for the burgeoning picture-postcard business - and he became an executive in that business along the way.

Again, it was a long life, filled with trips lugging a bulky, balky wet-plate camera: first, for many years on muleback, and then more often by train. Jackson started the business in Denver by 1870, when he wasn't quite thirty - and he lived to 99.

Griffith frames this all through conversations of the nonagenarian Jackson with Bonney, over meals and meetings in Jackson's apartment in Depression-era New York. (The crash of '29 wiped out what Jackson had thought would be his nest egg, which is one reason why he was still making paintings for the parks service at that age.) And he organizes it into twelve chapters, plus the Prologue about his own childhood and the surreal Epilogue set in both the real Yellowstone and the Hanna-Barbera Jellystone.

There's a lot of detail - a man who lived to 99 has a lot of life to cover - and Griffith keeps it organized, relevant, and particular. We don't learn much about Jackson's family life; the focus stays mostly on his work - but that's plenty for a good-length book (almost three hundred pages) filled with captions and notes. There's even a section at the end of Jackson's photographs, so we can actually see the work of the man we've been reading about.

Griffith's books have all been personal, so far - his mother, the model of his most famous character, his artistic idol, and now his namesake and predecessor in a roughly related field. I do think that's the underground in him, and wonder what else he'll find to make books about. Jackson lived to 99 in rugged good health; if Griffith follows that model he's got almost two more decades of productive time ahead of him. I hope that's true; I hope he keeps doing things like Photographic Memory and enjoys doing it.

[1] The first three being Invisible Ink, Nobody's Fool, and Three Rocks.