Viewing the archive: Timothy O'Sullivan's photographs for the Wheeler survey, 1871-74

The brilliance of this strategy resided in its rhetoric of immediacy. Instead of showing the viewer specimen collection in progress, as did Black Canon, photographs such as Melon Cactus put the viewer in the role of collector, enabling a vicarious participation in survey work. The photograph idealized and refined this work to the moment of capture, when the specimen appeared in full and measured display. Promoting the survey as a perfectly possessive mode of seeing, of course, also served to promote O'Sullivan's medium. Even as these pictures idealized the survey process as a way of taking possession of the West, they affirmed the visually acquisitive power of photography.

One could approach the photographs of self-exhibiting, marked surfaces with a similar wariness. The stark graphic qualities of photographs such as Snow Peaks and Ancient Ruins secured rhetorical values that outran their scientific utility. In Snow Peaks, for example, the path running across the snowy slope was less a helpful diagram of topographic traversal than a rhetorical depiction of the survey as a path-finding venture that could facilitate the extraction of valuable resources in remote areas. The enlistment of graphic reduction and legibility for rhetorical purposes in Ancient Ruins was more complex. The curvature of the weathered striations of the rock wall echoes that of the rope connecting the pair of figures on the upper ruins to that below. The exploratory penetration of the Euro-American into the West thus appeared in the image not only as a vigorous climb but also as an ascent associated with all the inevitability and grandeur of geologic process. Depicted as a page from the book of nature, the rock wall brought natural writing and the occupation of the West by Euro-Americans into utter harmony, as though the latter enjoyed the same divine sanction understood to apply to the former. (93)

Ancient Ruins thus merged a new technical mode of geologic and geographic representation with an older conflation of expansionist ambition and natural process. The figures registered as marks on a diagrammatic template (they are the same size as the anthropomorphic pictoglyph on the rock wall), but the diagram as a whole figuratively related a stock narrative of naturalized conquest. The novel distillation of the photograph as diagram reinforced a routine simplification of the politics at stake in the survey enterprise.

This braiding together of codes old and new may account in part for why this photograph has remained so distinctive and compelling. The view of the cliff proffered a collision of paradigms, simultaneously invoking the sublime and its disablement via technical mastery. It depicted survey work at the climax of its heroic ambition, when the mythically infinite spaces of the West were succumbing to the mensurational lengths to which that work would go.

This account of the ways in which O'Sullivan's survey photographs negotiated a peculiar set of historical conditions is meant to augment, and not supplant, accounts that stress the indexical assurances that gave early photography much of its special currency. These assurances would only have enhanced the persuasive power of these pictures. Even as Ancient Ruins invoked diagrammatic and narrative codes, it also declared the presence of the survey and O'Sullivan himself, at this rhetorically rich site. The photograph gave the survey a detachable, reproducible sign of this moment of presence, a distributable version of the fixed signature that one of the survey packers scrawled on the face of the upper ruins. (94)