T.H. O’Sullivan

T.H. O’Sullivan, Soda Lake, Carson Desert. (1867).

The nineteenth century believed—as perhaps at bottom we still believe—that the photograph did not lie. The photographers themselves, struggling to overcome the inherent distortions of their medium, knew that the claim, strictly speaking, was false; yet, with skill and patience and some luck, the camera could be made to tell the truth, a kind of truth that seemed—rightly or not—to transcend personal opinion.

What was new in the work of the frontier photographers grew in part from this faith that what a good photograph said was true, and that what was true was both relevant and interesting. It is difficult to imagine a painter of the period being satisfied with a picture so starkly simple in concept and image as Timothy O’Sullivan’s Soda Lake. But we are convinced that this is the way the place was. Sharing O’Sullivan’s faith in the magic of the camera, we find the picture’s emptiness eloquent; this minimal image hints of a new sense of scale between man and earth. Mark Twain had crossed the same country six years earlier, in 1861, and he saw a similar picture: “. . .there is not a sound—not a sigh—not a whisper—not a buzz, or a whir of wings, or a distant pipe of a bird—not even a sob from the lost souls that doubtless people that dead air.”

Of the half-dozen photographers who worked with the Government Surveys (geographical and geological) of 1867 to 1879, T.H. O’Sullivan was perhaps the one with the purest, the most consistent, and the most inventive vision. Nevertheless, the general level of the Surveys’ photography was remarkably high. With no academic authority looking over his shoulder, the photographer was free to give his camera its head, free to discover how it could see most clearly. At best, his solutions were original, functional, and uncomplicated by concern for artistic fashions. He was true to the essential character of his medium, and true also to the requirements of his job. His primary aim was not to philosophize about nature, but to describe the terrain. The West was a place to span with railroads, to dig for gold and silver, to graze cattle, or perhaps sell groceries and whiskey. Occasionally—and remarkably—an especially extravagant sample of spectacular landscape would be set aside, sacrosanct, for the amazement of posterity, but this was neither the first function, nor the first interest, of the Surveys.

John Szarkowski, Introduction. The Photographer and the American Landscape (1963).

Challenges to the accuracy and veracity of photographs began shortly after the introduction of the medium. What seems curious about Szarkowski’s contention here is the timing of his example from O’Sullivan. It was just before the first widely publicized case involving photographic fraud—the Mumler spirit photographs. The photographs in question were taken between November 1868 and March 1869; the case went to trial from April 21 through May 5, 1869. The leading critics of Mumler and leaders of the prosecution were other photographers and confidence men, most prominently P.T. Barnum. While a “sucker” might have believed photographs did not lie, photographers and promoters obviously did not. The “transcendent truth” of the photograph is a modernist myth, not a nineteenth century one.

The separation Szarkowski implies between photographers and painters is also a modernist vision—a view through rebel-colored glasses. The Bierstadt brothers would be a good counterexample (a photographer and a painter working together) or better still, a direct comparison between the landscape paintings from Moran taken on a survey which he traveled with photographer William Henry Jackson says much. Other than the painted rainbow, these two views of Yellowstone seem essentially similar both in content and emotional effect. Mathew Biagell argues that Bierstadt’s work was in a profound sense made possible by a photographically educated vision. This, of course, seriously undercuts the concept that Szarkowski is trying to build here—the photographer as the ultimate outsider.

O’Sullivan makes the perfect candidate for beatification. As biographer James Horan notes:

It is heart-rending to discover that not even the local weekly thought he deserved an obituary. He only rated four lines in a trade journal.

He sleeps today in an obscure grave in an ancient Staten Island cemetery, unknown, unhonored, and unsung. (5)

. . .

The deserts where he had almost died of thirst would quiver with the thunder of rockets, and the clean sharp air of Frenchmen Flat, which he knew so well, would witness a ball of fire so huge, so terrifying that it would dwarf all the cannons he had ever known in his war had they been placed wheel to wheel from Gettysburg to Fort Fisher.

For future generations of Americans, the Great West would not be the same. Only through the eyes of Tim O’Sullivan’s camera would they know it as it was. (318)

Timothy O’Sullivan: America’s Forgotten Photographer (1966).

We have know way of knowing what O’Sullivan’s intentions were; he has left scant evidence. I recently ordered Joel Snyder’s 1981 monograph on him, but I don’t think it will really cast that much more light on the subject. In a sense, O’Sullivan is the photographic equivalent of tofu—he takes on whatever flavor the critic writing about him supplies.