Photographer: Timothy O’Sullivan (1840-1882)
Timothy O’Sullivan was born in Ireland but came to New York City two years later with his parents. As a teenager, he was employed as an apprentice by photographer Matthew Brady (known for his photographs of the Civil War). When the Civil War began in early 1861, he was commissioned a first lieutenant in the Union Army but there is no record of him fighting. He most likely did civilian's work for the army such as surveying, and he took photographs in his spare time. After leaving the army, O’Sullivan rejoined Brady’s team. In 1862 he followed Maj. Gen. John Pope's Northern Virginia Campaign, and joined Alexander Gardner’s studio, thereby having 44 of his photographs published in the first Civil War photographs collection – Gardener’s Photographic Sketch of the War. In July 1863, O’Sullivan made some of his most famous photographs, of the war's anonymous dead, lying bloated in the bloody fields of Gettysburg and elsewhere, which are emblazoned into the consciousness of Americans.
Until the Civil War, photography had been a refined, mostly indoor craft, geared toward people in their Sunday best stopping by the studio for a family portrait. The Civil War changed all that. Its photographers essentially invented photojournalism, though McElroy says they were not always above staging their scenes.
From 1867 to 1869, O’Sullivan was the official photographer on the United States Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel under U.S geologist Clarence King, tasked with photographing the West to attract settlers. In 1870 he joined a survey team in Panama to survey for a canal across the isthmus. In 1871 O’Sullivan joined Lt. George M. Wheeler's survey west of the 100th meridian. He spent his last years in Washington, D.C., as official photographer for the U.S. Geological Survey and the Treasury Department, before dying of tuberculosis at the age of 42.
Work: US Geological Surveys
O’Sullivan’s pictures from Clarence King’s exploration of the Fortieth Parallel and Lt. George M. Wheeler’s survey of the 100th meridian made him one of the pioneers in the field of geophotography. Because of his work in U.S Civil War of 1861 to 1865, the organisers of the two geological surveys that he photographed knew that O'Sullivan was made of stern stuff and therefore could cope with the rigors of life outdoors far from home. During the Wheeler survey, O'Sullivan nearly drowned in the Truckee River (which runs from Lake Tahoe to Pyramid Lake, located in north-western Nevada) when his boat named ‘Picture’ got jammed against rocks. Gold pieces, photographic negatives and food were lost.
King’s survey was funded by the War Department, the plan being to survey the unexplored territory that lay between the California Sierras and the Rockies, with a view toward finding a good place to lay railroad tracks while also looking for mining possibilities and assessing the level of Indian hostility in the area. O'Sullivan was famous for not trying to romanticise the native American plight or way of life in his photographs and instead of asking them to wear tribal dress was happy to photograph them wearing denim jeans. He was trying to capture the everyday aspects of life for the indigenous peoples of North America; he did not use a studio to capture imagery of Native Americans, like many other photographers were at the time.
O'Sullivan’s work during Lt. George M. Wheeler's survey west of the One Hundredth Meridian in Black Canyon has been called some of the greatest photography of the 19th century and a clear inspiration for that other great American photographer Ansel Adams who later championed O’Sullivan’s work. The ordeals of the Wheeler survey pushed O’Sullivan to the extremes of his endurance, even as an experienced explorer. As well as surviving the rigours of the environment, O’Sullivan had to make pictures with a cumbersome wet-plate camera, developing the images in a portable darkroom pulled by four mules.
During the winter of 1867-68, in Virginia City, Nevada, he took the first underground mining pictures in America. Deep in mines where temperatures reached 130 degrees, O'Sullivan took pictures by the light of an improvised flash - magnesium wire - in difficult circumstances.
O'Sullivan one of the most intrepid and successful of the U.S. government expedition photographers who roamed the West under appalling conditions in the late 1860s and 1870s. Most of the photographers sent to document the West's native peoples and its geologic formations tried to make this strange new land accessible, even picturesque. Not O'Sullivan. At a time when Manifest Destiny demanded that Americans conquer the land, he pictured a West that was forbidding and inhospitable. With an almost modern sensibility, he made humans and their works insignificant. His photographs picture scenes, like a flimsy boat helpless against the dark shadows of Black Canyon, or explorers almost swallowed up by the crevices of Canyon de Chelly. There's not the sense that people were the equal to or above the landscape. They were not in charge.
O'Sullivan has been described as the right person who was there at the right time as he managed to document the re-birth of the nation through war in the early 1860's and then managed to be at the nexus of the great wave of exploration and migration westwards as the United States assumed what it thought to be its manifest destiny.
References
Cooper, R. (2012). How the Wild West REALLY looked: Gorgeous sepia-tinted pictures show the landscape as it was charted for the very first time. [online] Mail Online. Available at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2149899/The-American-West-youve-seen-Amazing-19th-century-pictures-landscape-chartered-time.html [Accessed 28 Jun. 2016].
Regan, M. (2003). The life of Timothy H. O'Sullivan. [online] Tucson Weekly. Available at: http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/the-life-of-timothy-h-osullivan/Content?oid=1071872 [Accessed 28 Jun. 2016].
Wikipedia. (2016). Geophotography. [online] Available at: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geophotography [Accessed 28 Jun. 2016].
Wikipedia. (2016). Timothy H. O'Sullivan. [online] Available at: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_H._O%27Sullivan [Accessed 28 Jun. 2016].
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