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

For a photograph to possess the kind of condensed intelligibility that was closely analogous, say, to that of a map, it had to apprehend or figure that intelligibility in the view as such. In other words, if O'Sullivan wanted the surfaces of his photographs to bear legible and densely significant marks on graphically clarified surfaces, he had to envisage the West as offering such surfaces to the lens. He had to devise views that could yield a photograph of distilled clarity despite the minimal reduction that his medium tended to obtain after the collection stage of the survey process.

Many of O'Sullivan's photographs bear signs of such an effort. For example, Snow Peaks and Ancient Ruins in the Canon de Chelle tendered surfaces already oriented to the archival plane of the page (Figs. 2, 1). The photographer blunted the illusionistic space afforded by the camera, presenting a set of overlapping planes in the one photograph and a single expansive plane in the other. Certain regular marks on these surfaces, trees and weathered striations, offered themselves as marks, coordinates measuring out the two-dimensional spans of the landscape. Ancient Ruins displayed on the surface of both cliff and photograph striations formally akin to those used by geologists to diagram strata beneath the surface (Fig. 8). Both photographs represented wild spaces as already organized by the disciplinary conventions of the survey, as already translated into distilled and measured charts of Western terrain.

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Within the regulated planes of these images, O'Sullivan managed to address yet another weakness of photography: its shortcoming as a means of producing temporal displays. (53) Among survey media, text was the principal means of delivering diachronic accounts, but the use of notations to indicate movement could provide iconic displays such as maps with a temporal dimension. (54) O'Sullivan used a similar strategy in these photographs: the surfaces within them, flattened up against the picture plane, display graphic records of the survey's progress. In Snow Peaks, a faint trail in the snow crosses the middle slope, and in Ancient Ruins, ropes connect the figures in the upper ruins to those below (Figs. 9, 10). The doubling of the pair of figures in the latter picture amplifies the implication that the photograph spatially delivers different states of time. These photographs thus resembled pictorial diagrams of movement, the indices of traversal analogous to the dotted lines that cross many schematic maps in topographers' sketchbooks.

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The pictorial and archival evidence suggests that O'Sullivan's penchant for distilling geometry, tracing survey movement, and orienting planes flat to the photographic plate may have been responsive to concerns about the limits of his medium relative to other graphic modes of survey collection and display. This analysis revises prevailing critiques of modernist interpretations of early survey work by proposing that the pictorial values of flatness, plotting, geometric distillation, and sharp value contrast are not merely retrospective projections of modernist sensibility, however much modernists may have misconstrued their historical meaning. The argument here braids the contextualist critique and the original modernist reception into a new interpretation of O'Sullivan's pictures. A photograph such as Historic Spanish Record of the Conquest (Fig. 7) did indeed offer nineteenth-century viewers a clarified reduction of the West to a flat, stark, measured surface, but this offering appealed to a sensibility quite different from that cultivated by Newhall and Adams. (55) The paradigmatic surface was not the spare wall of the modernist gallery but the distilled informational display of the report or atlas page. (56)