Double Exposure2024
Resurveying the West with Timothy O'Sullivan, America's Most Mysterious War Photographer
by Sullivan, Robert
A personal exploration of the American West and the work of one of America’s greatest photographers.
Timothy O’Sullivan is America’s most famous war photographer. You know his work even if you don’t know his name: A Harvest of Death, taken at Gettysburg, is an icon of the Civil War. He was also among the first photographers to elevate what was then a trade to the status of fine art. The images of the American West he made after the war, while traveling with the surveys led by Clarence King and George Wheeler, display a prescient awareness of what photography would become; years later, Ansel Adams would declare his work “surrealistic and disturbing.”
At the same time, we know very little about O’Sullivan himself. Nor do we know—really know—much more about the landscapes he captured....