Early photographer Timothy O’Sullivan left behind very little in the way of biographical documentation: no birth certificate, no marriage record. The best evidence of his life is his vast archive of images of Civil War– and Reconstruction-era America, which he observed with pioneer-like curiosity.
After the war, where he toiled on the front lines as an apprentice to Mathew Brady, O’Sullivan attached himself to various federal survey expeditions then beginning to penetrate far into the American West. The work he created on these journeys became what he is remembered for: evocative homages to unadulterated nature. The awe-inspiring swaths of empty land in O’Sullivan’s images feel especially poignant as Americans come to grips with the environmental consequences of the settlement and urbanization of remote areas of our country.
The Speed Art Museum addresses this dynamic in the new exhibition Capturing the West: Timothy O’Sullivan, Pioneer Photographer. The show focuses on the images O’Sullivan created as a member of the United States Geographical Surveys West of the One Hundredth Meridian, works that would inspire generations of future photographers, including Ansel Adams. The photographs in the series play with the balance of light and shadow, movement and stillness. O’Sullivan paints craggy shrubbery against soft sand, silky waterfalls against jagged rocks. Once in a great while, he blends a tiny human subject into the vast frame, Thomas Cole–style. In an era when photography was still largely seen as a tool of documentation, rather than as an art, O’Sullivan developed the principles of contrast and comparison that would reframe landscape photography for the next century.
This is the first time that the Speed’s full collection of albumen prints from O’Sullivan’s Surveys West of the One Hundredth Meridian series will be shown together, after its recent conservation. As noted on the museum’s website, the exhibition explores the “impact of American westward expansion on indigenous tribes encountered by O’Sullivan and the ways the landscape has changed in the past 150 years.” When we reflect on these photographs and the vastness of nature, it is difficult not to contextualize ourselves as the tiny human figures in a changing landscape.
Capturing the West: Timothy O’Sullivan, Pioneer Photographer • Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky • to August 25 • speedmuseum.org
