THE AMERICAN FRONTIER

PRINT EDITION CONTENTS past issues

PAST GALLERIES

Few know of Timothy O'Sullivan, though he was one of the first photographers to chronicle the American west. Alexander Ewing surveys a show of his work at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

Timothy O'Sullivan is an obscure 19th-century American photographer. Few have heard of him, even in artistic circles. His photographs of battlefield slaughter during the American civil war are eclipsed by—and sometimes misattributed to—the better-known Mathew Brady. Though O'Sullivan later became one of the first photographers to extensively document the hardscrabble landscapes of the American west, these works are also forgotten. Other photographers such as William Henry Jackson and Ansel Adams dominate coffee tables.

But after decades of collecting dust in the American Library of Congress, O'Sullivan's work is finally getting some notice. A large collection of his western photography is now on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, featuring photographs taken during government survey expeditions in the 1860s and '70s. Often stuffed into federal reports and catalogues, these images gained little attention at the time. Many of them have not been seen publicly in over a hundred years.

"Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O'Sullivan" is an effort to recognise O'Sullivan's place as a photographic pioneer of the American landscape who walked the line between documentation and art. Highlighting O'Sullivan's influence on our romantic sense of the west, the show includes some works by contemporary landscape photographers who pay homage to his sensibility.

As a professional photographer with bureaucrat bosses, O'Sullivan was lucky to travel to such vast and varied parts of America, much of it never before captured on film. Despite the parameters dictated by his job and medium (early wet-plate negatives, which were inconvenient for field use), the photographs themselves often reveal the work of an artist.

In many of his photographs O'Sullivan has a solitary figure, usually someone from the survey team, sitting in the foreground or standing off in the distance. This gives viewers a sense of scale, but also depicts a personal experience of such vastness. O'Sullivan's photographs aim to convey the landscape from a human perspective, planting viewers in the dirt beside him.

O'Sullivan's first expedition, in 1867, was a matter of geologic reconnaissance. Clarence King, a geologist, led a band of surveyors and scientists through the swath of land that stretches from Wyoming to California, roughly along the path of the soon-to-be completed transcontinental railroad. King had O'Sullivan document rock outcroppings and sheer cliff-sides, a landscape carved and cleaved by sudden catastrophic events. He had hoped these photographs would counter the theory—inspired by Darwin—that the land had been formed slowly over thousands of years.

In 1876 King produced 180 of O'Sullivan's prints (including work from a later expedition in 1872), dozens of which hang in this exhibition. In these images King's west is visually organised as a series of rocky outcroppings and canyons, captured in the warm sepia tone of albumen photographs of the period. Wet-plate photography made the job tricky, especially in dusty wilderness, so O'Sullivan's shots are impressive for their clarity and detail. Viewer can perceive geologic history in the finite gradation of eroding sandstone.

Exposures during this time were particularly slow, so these photographs lack the dramatic contrast and turbulent skies in later images of similar scenes. Movement, especially on water, is blurred, yet O'Sullivan used this to great effect. In a picture of the Shoshone Falls in Idaho (see above), the Snake River drops off a series of terraced cliffs in white, silky blurs, while the exposed rock outcroppings are in crisp focus. In a series of photographs of the Green River in Colorado, the water has a stirringly placid quality.

These photographs of a rugged, harsh and barren landscape are hung alongside others taken during surveys under George Wheeler, an Army Lieutenant, in the early 1870s. This work, covering 360,000 miles of the American south-west, was concerned with mapping possible routes for troop movements in Nevada and Arizona, where Native Americans still lived. Wheeler instructed O'Sullivan to capture visually alluring stretches of uninhabited space, ripe with possibilities.

Many have long believed that America's engagement with its wilderness defined its national character, which is steeped in rugged frontier individualism. The west has been mythologised as a space for bravery and discovery, for the intrepid expansion of civilisation. By the end of the 19th century, nearly all of this open terrain went the way of settlements. The romance of the wilderness was soon domesticated by the automobile.

Yet O'Sullivan's photographs did not reinforce this grand frontier vision. Rather, there is something desolate in the vastness of his images. Within the confines of his viewfinder, he captured a sense of unending nothingness, and an isolation familiar to the thousands of Americans who migrated there, most of them unprepared for the inhospitable world they would soon inhabit.

"Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O'Sullivan" is at the Smithsonian American Art Museum until the May 9th

(Alexander Ewing is a writer based in Washington, DC. His last article for More Intelligent Life was about our board-game renaissance.)

Picture credit: Black Cañon, Colorado River, from Camp 8, Looking Above (Wheeler Survey), 1871, by Timothy O'Sullivan, courtesy of the American Art Museum; Shoshone Falls, Idaho, 1868, by Timothy O'Sullivan. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division; National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC