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

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This argument does not aim at closure, and two complications are especially worthy of note. The first is that the photographic strategies informing O'Sullivan's practice did not remain constant over the years of the survey. As suggested at the beginning of this essay, his choice of subjects changed over the three seasons he worked for Wheeler in the field. For example, O'Sullivan took many pictures of mining operations in 1871 but very few thereafter, Humphreys having evidently concluded that the emphasis on mining photographs had been unwise. (105) In the albums produced by the survey, the one photograph of mining (if it can be called that) repeatedly given prominence is Snow Peaks, which does not show the mine to which the caption alludes at all. Perhaps the most plausible explanation for this course of events is that Humphreys decided that promotional efforts related to mining did well to assert mining's invisibility. The 1873 field season was marked by the heavy emphasis on pictures of American Indians, and the 1874 season is notable both for the many pictures that insisted on the agricultural potential of the Southwest and for O'Sullivan's side trip to Shoshone Falls. The trip to the falls confirms that by O'Sullivan's last season in the field the promotional aspects of his practice had begun to trump its function as a means of recording places, things, and people encountered by the survey. Although Shoshone Falls was outside the ambit of Wheeler's expeditions in 1874, and no other specialist besides O'Sullivan made the trip, photographs of the falls appeared in the survey's albums and photographic sets.

The second complication worth mentioning is that a strong case can be made that O'Sullivan's subjectivity skewed the objective determinants this article has identified. More specifically, there are signs that the photographer put an idiosyncratic and skeptical spin on his appropriation of various graphic tactics and values. Although O'Sullivan had many reasons to amplify the capacity of his medium to both deliver knowledge and assert that knowledge and security (and only incidentally pleasure) were being delivered by the survey, one could argue that in the process he injected his own doubts about the survey as a process. Even as he produced images in keeping with the demands of his assignment, he introduced odd indeterminacies that threatened the very capacity he had ostensibly worked so hard to obtain.

Examples of such indeterminacies appear in the photographs already discussed, perhaps most cleverly in Historic Spanish Record (Fig. 7). In many respects, this picture fits snugly within the survey's ideological operations: the yardstick measured the lesser span of the Spanish inscription, associating the survey's mensurational sight with a new moment of historical conquest. The image pictured the West as a conflict on a graphic surface, won by the greater scope and clarity of the survey's notations. But such an understanding of the image runs up against the odd fact that the numerals of the gingerly propped yardstick lie partially obscured by the yucca plant before it. Since the key fact about the subject of the picture was the indeterminacy of the second digit of the inscribed year (a 5 or a 7), the obscured numerals of the yardstick call into question how much greater certainty the survey has secured. The numeral 18 that pops out between the interruptive leaves at the center of the image takes up a pictorial dialogue with the 18 in the inscription, establishing a visual play between measures of time and space. These pictorial quirks may have been accidental, of course, but this possibility is undercut by the care evident in the picture's construction and by the fact that O'Sullivan took another version (little known) that lacks these subtleties. Moreover, the jerry-rigged support of the yardstick seems a prolepsis of the very notion of accident in taking the measure of the image.