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

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The germane evidence indicates that this visual affinity between O'Sullivan's photographs and other graphic materials stemmed from his extensive involvement in the survey as both process and project. He was intricately engaged in a broad array of survey operations and had manifold reasons for thinking of his practice as analogous to other modes of recording and display.

From the early days of the survey, O'Sullivan's responsibilities in the field extended well beyond his role as photographer. The expeditionary culture placed a premium on competence, endurance, and reliability, and personnel who demonstrated these traits received commands that exceeded their designated expertise. To cover vast areas of terrain, Wheeler had to divide his expeditionary force into multiple parties, one led by him, the others by these especially trusted personnel. The lieutenant immediately attributed to O'Sullivan the requisite potential for leadership: only six days out of Halleck Station in May 1871, he gave him "co-equal powers of authority" over the operations of a side party that had been exclusively entrusted to the geologist G. K. Gilbert. (5) Later in the season he put O'Sullivan in charge of one of his three riverboats on the journey up the Colorado, and in subsequent years he often assigned the photographer to head small reconnaissance parties for weeks at a time. In his field orders, Wheeler explicitly extended authority and responsibility for the maintenance of military discipline to his designated agents, and O'Sullivan evidently took up this duty without hesitation. When a hired guide abandoned the party and then returned, he was tied up, and one member of the party, the artist Alexander H. Wyant, wrote in his diary, "Just what O'Sullivan will do with the poor devil I don't know." (6)

In short, unlike many artists, journalists, and some photographers who accompanied Western expeditions, O'Sullivan occupied a position of leadership that immersed him in the everyday activities of survey work. The photographer William Bell, for example, who replaced O'Sullivan on the Wheeler survey for the 1872 season, had no such broad involvement. When Bell joined Wheeler, the lieutenant, as though conscious of the extraordinary precedent that O'Sullivan had set, proclaimed that the new photographer would "perform only those duties belonging to his special avocation." (7)

O'Sullivan's experience as a supervisor in the field would have not only acquainted him with the survey's coordinated efforts and overall aims but also invited him to consider his practice in relation to other technical or scientific modes of apprehending the West. All specialists on the expeditions were engaged in collecting information, impressions, or specimens from traversed regions, and photography was, from this point of view, simply one of several modes of acquisition.

We have only meager textual evidence of O'Sullivan's own understanding of his photographic practice, but that evidence tends to confirm that he understood survey photography as a mode of labor, one of many ways of working in the field. The main textual source is an essay entitled "Photographs from the High Rockies" published in Harper's in 1869. (8) The authorship of the essay is a conundrum; it is attributed in the magazine to a "John Samson," yet the essay is illustrated with engravings based on O'Sullivan's photographs and evidently informed by the photographer's experiences on the King survey. (9) The most plausible explanation is that the article was based on an interview with O'Sullivan; if that is the case, the many quotations offer evidence of how he described his practice. (10) These quotations time and again interweave the terms view and work. The photographer refers to the instruments and chemicals necessary for him to "work up his views." (11) Of the Humboldt and Carson Sinks he opines, "It was a pretty location to work in and viewing there was as pleasant work as could be desired." (12) Another quotation in the same passage suggests that working up a locality could refer to multiple survey practices of which photography was but one: the photographer notes regretfully that because of the voracious mosquitoes and the threat of "mountain ail" around the sinks, he and his companions "did not work up more of that country." (13)