Timothy O’ Sullivan was a photographer of taking pictures behind the lines on the battlefields of the Civil War. O’ Sullivan was established in his own Washington firm to publish war. In 1860 his assistant Mathew brady went into a New York studio and was in the “Bradys photographic corps.’ He was working with Alexander Gardner and took O’Sullivan along. Timothy has taken wide-ranging in subject and saw the horror of fields of the dead. The war ended and discovered a use for his energies and experiences as a photographer. He explored the strange and inhospitable regions with a group headed by the geologist Clarence King. Following a brief period with the Darien Survey to the Isthmus of Panama, where both the humid atmosphere and the densely foliated terrain made photography difficult, he found another position on a western survey. After 1875, O’Sullivan’s problematical health and the winding down of survey photography put an end to further involvement with the western landscape. As Weston Naef has pointed out, photography on the Geological Surveys West of the 100th Meridian, as the expedition commanded by Lieutenant George M. Wheeler of the Army Corps of Engineers was called, “was not so much a scientific tool as it was a means of publicizing the Survey’s accomplishments in the hopes of persuading Congress to fund military rather than civilian expeditions in the future.” O’Sullivan approached western landscape with the documentarian’s respect for the integrity of visible evidence and the camera artist’s understanding of how to isolate and frame decisive forms and structures in nature. I chose Sullivan because he seemed interesting in what he was taking pictures of. He has a cool background story and how he got into the studio. I think people who took pictures of the war spreads awareness and love, for those who have family or friends in the army, marines, navy, etc.
