Henry Bosse

Born in Prussia in 1844, Bosse immigrated to America about 1870. Entering the service of the U.S. Corps of Engineers as a draftsman in 1874, he was chief draftsman by 1887. During his tenure he produced photographs, maps, and drawings of engineering projects along the Upper Mississippi River. Many of the photographs were printed as cyanotypes, a process that provided easy and economical proofs for study, and were later bound into albums with elaborately hand-decorated and lettered title pages. Presented to various dignitaries of the Corps of Engineers, the prints were also exhibited at the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893.

Merry A. Foresta American Photographs: The First Century (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art with the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996)