American photographer. He was employed in the studio of Mathew Brady in Washington, DC, when the Civil War (1861–5) broke out. After photographing the early stages of the war in South Carolina, he left Brady’s studio to work for Alexander Gardner, and almost one half of the photographs in Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the War (?New York, 1866/R1959) are by him. O’Sullivan’s war photographs, like Gardner’s, moved beyond the superficial documentation of battlefields and the mundane activities of armies, and he began to photograph the grim reality of war; he is particularly noted for his photographs of battlefield dead (e.g. Field where General Reynolds Fell, 1863; see Snyder, 1981, p. 17).
In 1867–9 and 1872 O’Sullivan accompanied the geologist Clarence King (1842–1901) on his Fortieth Parallel Survey expeditions, photographing some of the West’s more extraordinary geological sites, natural resources and important mining areas. In the landscape of the West, King saw confirmation of his view that geological change came through catastrophic upheaval, and his theories probably influenced O’Sullivan’s approach to the landscape. O’Sullivan’s work for King depicts immense, arid, unpopulated spaces and freakish remnants of past geological eras. During 1870, O’Sullivan accompanied a US Navy expedition to the Isthmus of Darien in Panama in search of a possible canal route, but the difficult circumstances prevented him from accomplishing much there.
In 1871, 1873 and 1874 O’Sullivan embarked on his final series of photographic explorations of the West, this time with the Geographical Survey West of the One Hundredth Meridian, under Lieutenant George M. Wheeler (1842–1905). During the Wheeler expeditions, he broadened his subject-matter to include images of early pioneer settlements, historic American Indian and Spanish Conquest sites (e.g. Ancient Ruins in the Cañon de Chelle, 1873; New York, MOMA, see Snyder, 1981, p. 95), and North American Indian villages and groups. O’Sullivan emerged from these three expeditions with some of his most resonant works: remarkably conceived and emotionally powerful landscapes of the Grand Canyon in Arizona (especially the 1871 series taken in Black Canyon) and of the Shoshone Falls and the Snake River in Idaho.
The years between 1874 and 1880 (when he secured a position as photographer for the US Treasury Department) were difficult and unproductive. Poor health forced O’Sullivan to resign his position only six months after being hired. After his death, he was essentially forgotten for nearly 60 years, until Ansel Adams and others discovered his photographs of the West. Adams proclaimed his work ‘extraordinary’ and praised him as a ‘hardy and direct artist’, regarding him as a precursor of Edward Weston, Paul Strand and their followers. This initiated a revival of interest, and his work was seen to embody the spirit of 19th-century America’s national tragedies and aspirations.
Terence Pitts
From Grove Art Online
© 2009 Oxford University Press