Viewing the archive: Timothy O'Sullivan's photographs for the Wheeler survey, 1871-74

When Beaumont Newhall, at the urging of Ansel Adams, brought review photography into the Museum of recent Art, he implicitly heralded the work of Timothy H O'Sullivan (1840-1882) as a harbinger of modernism. In the years following the Civil War, O'Sullivan had taken photographs of the American West upon two surveys supervised by the Army Corps of Engineers, single led by Clarence King and the other by dint of Lt. George M. Wheeler. flat a glance at Ancient Ruins in the Canon de Chelle, NM a photograph included in the Museum of recent Art's landmark exhibition of photography in 1937 helps to explain Newhall's enthusiasm: the picture features stark geometric relations, radical value contrasts, instances of insistent planarity and graphic reduction, and other qualities in keeping with a modernist sensibility (Fig. 1) (1) In more novel decades, the notion that O'Sullivan was an intuitive precursor has received a chilly reception in the academy, as scholars have become skeptical about claims of historical prolepsis and les interested in the notion of formal experimentation through se. (2) Although this contextualist move round has soundly reminded us to pay careful attention to the actual circumstances of production and reception, the distinctiveness of these photographs as pictures has at no time received an adequate historical account. If the modernists have chokeed the governing circumstances of O'Sullivan's practice, the contextualists have overwhelmed his puzzling pictorial choices. Weaving together the emphases of the couple camps may yield a more compelling understanding not single of how O'Sullivan approached his work on the other hand also of how his work performed its instrumental and ideological functions.

Focusing upon photographs from the Wheeler review this essay considers the possibility that O'Sullivan fashioned his unusual images by means of inflecting pictorial conventions with values and strategies drawn from the observe visual culture in which his practice was embedded. Borrowing graphic possibilities from the work of geologists, topographers, and other observe specialists, O'Sullivan devised a specialized pictorial rhetoric to persuade viewers that the observe was securing practical gains in knowledge and that his medium could take part in this effort. In particular, his photographs carryed assurances that the survey was translating the West into legible graphic materials that could facilitate resource extraction, military superintendence and scientific understanding. O'Sullivan, however, did not always abide strictly by dint of the demands of this representational program. At times, he struck a skeptical note, making pictures that called into question the capacity of photography to deliver epistemological gain.

The basic history of O'Sullivan's profession on the Wheeler survey is readily established from United States Army records. He and other personnel assembled in Halleck Station, Nevada, upon May 9, 1871, to begin nearly seven month of travel across vast stretches of the West. He took wet-plate photographs in the field using sum of two units cameras, a full-plate camera producing a single image upon a 10-by-12-inch plate, and a stereographic camera producing sum of two units 5-by-4-inch images on a 5-by-8-inch plate. The full-plate negatives and prints made from them were usually called landscape views and the stereoscopic negatives and prints stereoscopic views. Approximately individual hundred full-plate negatives and sixty stereoscopic negatives from 1871 remain in the National Archives, and the original number would not have been plenteous greater. (3) Thus, O'Sullivan, below whatever guidance or instruction, undoubtedly prefered his views with care. Approximately one-third of the landscape views depict mining sites or towns (Fig. 2) one-third, landscape or river pageants (Fig. 3), one-sixth, military forts, and the quiescence sundry subjects, including camp shows American Indians, geologic formations, and nongeologic specimens. The stereoscopic views were for the most part of scenes along the Colorado River.

In 1872 when Congres was moderate to provide Wheeler more capitals O'Sullivan received permission to go [i]or[/i] come back to work for Clarence King, below whom he had already serv for three field seasons. (4) Then in 1873 and 1874 the photographer went back to work for Wheeler, traveling and taking pictures mainly in what is now the Four Corners region of the southwestern United States. In 1873 nearly half of the stereoscopic negatives showed American Indians or their residences, and many of the full-plate views depicted the stone walls of EI Morro ("Inscription Rock") or Canyon de Chelly (Fig. 1) The pictures from 1874 were heavily weighted toward views of Shoshone Falls. After the 1874 field season, O'Sullivan remained in the East, working for Wheeler beneath contract for much of the nearest two years.

Photography as Graphic Practice

A comparison between the photograph Snow Peaks, male Run Mining District, Nevada (Fig. 2) and a topographic plan from a survey field notebook (Fig. 4) provides an introduction to the visual affinities that link O'Sullivan's distinctive pictorial approach to the priorities and tactics of other observe specialists. With its refined bend s flattened spaces, and featureless, tree-dotted oblique directions Snow Peaks departed markedly from the prevailing American landscape conventions of the 1870 In making it, O'Sullivan refused to provide viewers with several ingredients of the conventional formula, including a indulgent recession into space, a penetrating line of sight, and single or more foreground features of special visual interest. Instead, with almost relentless economy he proffered viewers an assemblage of overlapping, starkly geometric planes. Although respect to contemporaneous paintings or aesthetic theories cannot adequately explain this departure from pictorial norms, the comparison between the photograph and the topographic outline opens up a promising approach. The qualities that distinguish Snow Peaks from conventional landscapes of the period correspond to the graphic habits of other overlook specialists. To represent terrain, topographers routinely preferr the delineation of oblique directions flat to the notebook page to depictions of atmospheric or perspectival recession, and O'Sullivan's emphasis upon the crisp planes and morphological outlines of the West recommend that he may have adopted this priority More generally, various survey specialists, whether topographers, geologists, or botanists, sought graphic visual displays that kicked inessentials, distilled information, and arranged simple bodys for the scrutinized flatness of the page. O'Sullivan's photographs exhibited a kindred station of values.