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

Robin E. Kelsey

When Beaumont Newhall, at the urging of Ansel Adams, brought survey photography into the Museum of Modern Art, he implicitly heralded the work of Timothy H. O'Sullivan (1840-1882) as a harbinger of modernism. In the years following the Civil War, O'Sullivan had taken photographs of the American West on two surveys supervised by the Army Corps of Engineers, one led by Clarence King and the other by Lt. George M. Wheeler. Even a glance at Ancient Ruins in the Canon de Chelle, N.M., a photograph included in the Museum of Modern Art's landmark exhibition of photography in 1937, helps to explain Newhall's enthusiasm: the picture features stark geometric relations, radical value contrasts, instances of insistent planarity and graphic reduction, and other qualities in keeping with a modernist sensibility (Fig. 1). (1) In more recent decades, the notion that O'Sullivan was an intuitive precursor has received a chilly reception in the academy, as scholars have become skeptical about claims of historical prolepsis and less interested in the notion of formal experimentation per se. (2) Although this contextualist turn has soundly reminded us to pay careful attention to the actual circumstances of production and reception, the distinctiveness of these photographs as pictures has never received an adequate historical account. If the modernists have suppressed the governing circumstances of O'Sullivan's practice, the contextualists have suppressed his puzzling pictorial choices. Weaving together the emphases of both camps may yield a more compelling understanding not only of how O'Sullivan approached his work but also of how his work performed its instrumental and ideological functions.

Focusing on photographs from the Wheeler survey, this essay considers the possibility that O'Sullivan fashioned his unusual images by inflecting pictorial conventions with values and strategies drawn from the survey visual culture in which his practice was embedded. Borrowing graphic possibilities from the work of geologists, topographers, and other survey specialists, O'Sullivan devised a specialized pictorial rhetoric to persuade viewers that the survey was securing practical gains in knowledge and that his medium could take part in this effort. In particular, his photographs conveyed assurances that the survey was translating the West into legible graphic materials that could facilitate resource extraction, military control, and scientific understanding. O'Sullivan, however, did not always abide strictly by the demands of this representational program. At times, he struck a skeptical note, making pictures that called into question the capacity of photography to deliver epistemological gain.

The basic history of O'Sullivan's employment on the Wheeler survey is readily established from United States Army records. He and other personnel assembled in Halleck Station, Nevada, on May 9, 1871, to begin nearly seven months of travel across vast stretches of the West. He took wet-plate photographs in the field using two cameras, a full-plate camera producing a single image on a 10-by-12-inch plate, and a stereographic camera producing two 5-by-4-inch images on a 5-by-8-inch plate. The full-plate negatives and prints made from them were usually called landscape views and the stereoscopic negatives and prints stereoscopic views. Approximately one hundred full-plate negatives and sixty stereoscopic negatives from 1871 remain in the National Archives, and the original number would not have been much greater. (3) Thus, O'Sullivan, under whatever guidance or instruction, undoubtedly selected his views with care. Approximately one-third of the landscape views depict mining sites or towns (Fig. 2), one-third, landscape or river scenes (Fig. 3), one-sixth, military forts, and the rest, sundry subjects, including camp scenes, American Indians, geologic formations, and nongeologic specimens. The stereoscopic views were mostly of scenes along the Colorado River.

In 1872, when Congress was slow to provide Wheeler more funds, O'Sullivan received permission to return to work for Clarence King, under whom he had already served for three field seasons. (4) Then in 1873 and 1874, the photographer went back to work for Wheeler, traveling and taking pictures mainly in what is now the Four Corners region of the southwestern United States. In 1873, nearly half of the stereoscopic negatives represented American Indians or their residences, and many of the full-plate views depicted the rock walls of EI Morro ("Inscription Rock") or Canyon de Chelly (Fig. 1). The pictures from 1874 were heavily weighted toward views of Shoshone Falls. After the 1874 field season, O'Sullivan remained in the East, working for Wheeler under contract for much of the next two years.

Photography as Graphic Practice

A comparison between the photograph Snow Peaks, Bull Run Mining District, Nevada (Fig. 2) and a topographic sketch from a survey field notebook (Fig. 4) provides an introduction to the visual affinities that link O'Sullivan's distinctive pictorial approach to the priorities and tactics of other survey specialists. With its refined curves, flattened spaces, and featureless, tree-dotted slopes, Snow Peaks departed markedly from the prevailing American landscape conventions of the 1870s. In making it, O'Sullivan refused to provide viewers with several ingredients of the conventional formula, including a gentle recession into space, a penetrating line of sight, and one or more foreground features of special visual interest. Instead, with almost severe economy he proffered viewers an assemblage of overlapping, starkly geometric planes. Although reference to contemporaneous paintings or aesthetic theories cannot adequately explain this departure from pictorial norms, the comparison between the photograph and the topographic sketch opens up a promising approach. The qualities that distinguish Snow Peaks from conventional landscapes of the period correspond to the graphic habits of other survey specialists. To represent terrain, topographers routinely preferred the delineation of slopes flat to the notebook page to depictions of atmospheric or perspectival recession, and O'Sullivan's emphasis on the crisp planes and morphological outlines of the West suggest that he may have adopted this preference. More generally, various survey specialists, whether topographers, geologists, or botanists, sought graphic visual displays that spurned inessentials, distilled information, and arranged elements for the scrutinized flatness of the page. O'Sullivan's photographs exhibited a kindred set of values.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

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)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

With respect to the survey process, working up a region ultimately meant collecting data, specimens, and qualitative representations to translate each locality into the pages of reports, atlases, and albums. (14) A seasoned survey veteran such as O'Sullivan would have been intimately familiar with the facts of this translation process.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The collection activities of the survey were of remarkable extent and diversity. On the Wheeler survey in 1871, topographers recorded measurements of distances and altitudes, a geologist jotted down observations concerning rock formations and deposits, a meteorologist and his assistants regularly measured air temperature, barometric pressure, and other atmospheric conditions, specialists in geodesy took astronomical measurements, various personnel scoured the ground for fossils, relics, minerals, and biological specimens, and an artist, a journalist, and the photographer O'Sullivan amassed qualitative observations and impressions. (15)

The material that the survey brought back from the field fell roughly into three categories: data (quantitative translations), specimens (physical retrievals), and a hybrid category of things simultaneously translated and preserved qualitatively for future inspection. Sketches, written descriptions, and photographs were prime examples of items that belonged to this third category. (16) In general, the survey used this hybrid form when the object in the field was of qualitative interest and not portable, either because it was too large, such as an Anasazi ruin, or because it was immaterial, such as a Hopi dance. (17)

Every survey specialist bore modern equipment to aid in the collection process: O'Sullivan had his two cameras and a portable darkroom filled with bottles of chemicals and other gear, and his fellow specialists were similarly laden with technical devices, including theodolites, gradienters, pivot levels, field and prismatic compasses, barometers, sextants, steel and linen tapes for measuring short distances, and odometers attached to vehicles for measuring longer distances. (18) For the most part, the surveys of the 1860s and 1870s were not explorations of unknown terrain; rather, they were operations by which previously explored areas were subjected to new levels of technical scrutiny. Thus, both Wheeler's superior, Brig. Gen. Andrew A. Humphreys, chief of engineers, and Wheeler stressed that large areas of the West had not been "explored instrumentally." (19)

The acquisitive tenor of work in the field was pervasive. Preparing for specimen collection in 1873, Wheeler's chief surgeon and naturalist ordered a large quantity of taxidermic mixture, 144 homeopathic vials, 48 preserving cans of assorted sizes, 2 copper preserving tanks, 20 gallons of alcohol in cans, 1 bird-collecting chest, 2 collecting boxes, 4 mammal traps, 4 insect nets, 2 guns, 2 dissecting cases, and 288 bottles and 288 wooden boxes of assorted sizes. (20) Prior to the 1874 field season, the survey purchased hundreds of hooks, dozens of sinkers, and hundreds of feet of line for the collection of specimens of fish. (21) As the survey passed through large regions of the West, birds were shot, fish caught, and butterflies asphyxiated. (22) Survey mules no doubt became progressively burdened with bottles and boxes full of preserved specimens of birds, insects, mammals, plants, fish, fossils, minerals, scraps of textiles, pottery shards, stone tools, and other removable items. Wheeler's annual report for the 1874 field season stated that his expedition had amassed 9,000 botanical specimens, 20,155 specimens of mammals, fish, reptiles, and insects, 1,227 specimens of birds, and 497 lots of geologic and mineralogical specimens. (23)

Because the scope of the collection effort necessitated cooperation among the members of the survey's technical staff who worked in the field, O'Sullivan took part in collection practices outside his area of expertise. He worked closely with Gilbert on the collection of geologic specimens, and the archaeologist Frederick Putnam credited him with collecting a number of important pottery shards when the survey visited ruins in New Mexico in 1874. In a report from the field in 1873, Wheeler informed Humphreys that O'Sullivan was "engaged in the White Mountains ... securing photographic negatives & collections." (24)

O'Sullivan's stereographic image from 1871 of a melon cactus bears signs of his imbrication of photography and the practice of specimen collection (Fig. 5). The cactus appears near the center of the dual images, oriented to maximize the display of its features, with a hat placed beside it to provide a sense of scale. The same visual strategies informed a tiny sketch of cedars that the geologist Gilbert made in a field notebook during the same field season (Fig. 6). In making their records, both O'Sullivan and Gilbert partook of a survey mode of collection and display whereby a botanical specimen was to be featured in fullness and centrality, flanked by a familiar secondary element to enable the viewer to gauge its size. Like a specimen, the photograph of the cactus was shipped back to the survey offices, prepared, labeled, mounted, and preserved with other records from the expedition. A description of the cactus from an official list of survey stereographs affirmed its taxonomic status: "Melon-cactus (Cereus etenoides), three feet in height and sixteen inches in diameter." (25)

Although O'Sullivan's immersion in survey culture was certainly at its most intense in the field, it did not end after each field season when the expedition force disbanded. During the winter months he did contract work for Wheeler in Washington, D.C., making prints from survey negatives and evidently helping with the writing of captions and legends. (26) He also photographed maps and perhaps specimens. (27) In sum, he was not only broadly involved in the collection stage of the survey process but also clearly acquainted with the preparation, compilation, and distribution of survey reports and other publications.

Photography was deeply entwined with other modes of graphic representation in these later stages of the survey process. Surveys were fundamentally graphic productions, and the proportion of each annual budget devoted to the making of maps, illustrations, and photographs amounted to as much as half. By commissioning specialists to produce these graphic materials, the federal government became a major supporter of the American lithographic industry, and the vestiges of this production are ubiquitous in the archives, where many of Wheeler's notes are jotted down on the backs of scraps of lithographed maps. (28)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Initially, the survey printed only small batches of photographs from the negatives made by O'Sullivan in 1871 and William Bell in 1872, but production accelerated in the early months of 1873. In January, Humphreys provided Wheeler with $250 to prepare 200 full-plate photographs and 200 stereographs (from an unknown number of negatives) for the Vienna Exposition of that year. (29) Then, in February, Wheeler initiated a larger production by ordering 1,740 titled cardboard mounts for full-plate photographs and 8,700 mounts for stereographs. (30) To assist in the printing and mounting of views, he obtained the services of Lewis Walker, the official photographer of the Treasury Department and a friend of O'Sullivan. (31) In the fall of 1873, Walker delivered 3,527 stereographs from the 1871 and 1872 field seasons, which Wheeler started distributing in January 1874. (32) During the period of late 1873 and early 1874, Walker was also making sample prints from the 1873 stereoscopic and full-plate negatives as they arrived from the field, and in March 1874, another production of 5,450 stereographs from the 1871 and 1872 field seasons was completed. (33) Wheeler also decided to follow King's example and compile full-plate photographs into albums. Mention of binding full-plate views from the 1871 and 1872 seasons appears as early as February 1873. (34) By late in that year, Wheeler had initiated the production of fifty copies of such an album, of which at least twenty-two were ultimately produced. (35) Wheeler was simultaneously planning to publish an album of views from the 1873 field season in an edition of fifty to one hundred. (36) When O'Sullivan completed his field seasons and began spending the entire year in Washington, the production of photographs and albums accelerated. (37)

On both the King and Wheeler surveys, O'Sullivan also witnessed the translation of his views into lithographs and engravings and the incorporation of these reproductions into survey reports, where they appeared in the company of texts, diagrams, reproductions of sketches, and other graphic material. He had long been familiar with the use of photography in nonpictorial graphic productions, dating back to the Civil War, when his boss Alexander Gardner and other war photographers made photographs of maps, drawings, and engineering diagrams. (38) He understood, in other words, that photography could take part in representations of terrain that involved various graphic modes and conventions, some pictorial and some not. Wheeler's gift to O'Sullivan of a valuable atlas of survey maps tends to confirm the photographer's interest in the nonpictorial productions of his colleagues. (39)

O'Sullivan's appropriation of the values and tactics of other survey specialists was more than a result of influence or osmosis. He had two competing and compelling motivations driving his opportunistic practice: the need to make photography a more effective survey instrument and the need to make photography a more effective means of promoting survey work. These pervasive and at times contradictory demands informed the salient qualities of his pictures.

Strategies of Compensation

The survey process was predicated on the capacity of instrument-bearing specialists to increase the density of signification and the legibility of materials from one stage of the process to the next. (40) Distillation of essential information and heightened legibility were central goals. For example, topographers would record a mountain as a set of measurements, which a cartographer would later condense into a set of contour lines, enabling the ready visual apprehension of the mountain as a topographic fact. Labels and other designations on the map would ensure that the contour lines successfully referred back to the mountain from which the measurements were drawn (distillation and legibility only retained value if denotation was preserved). The notions of condensing or reducing information crop up repeatedly in the survey archives. Wheeler emphasized the priority that his survey placed on collecting data into "a condensed form of the topographic record." (41) He described the work of his cartographers as "the reduction and presentation of topography." (42) This process of reduction occurred in the making not only of maps but also of diagrams, tables, and written reports. A single table, accessible at a glance, organized and condensed meteorological data collected from thousands of square miles over an entire season. (43)

For O'Sullivan, at least in his capacities as survey photographer, participating directly in this chain of reduction was a difficult task. Although the photograph guaranteed a continuity of denotation through captioning and resemblance, the extent of its capacity for increasing legibility and condensing significance was open to question, and Wheeler himself expressed uncertainty about the value of photography as a tool of geographic surveying.

The main problem with photography was its analog nature. Although the camera could deliver precision, it was not a quantitative precision; the camera, in short, failed to measure. (44) Wheeler regretted this flaw of photography and looked forward to its emendation:

   Should we, by the application of skilled labor and the
   refinement of instruments, be able to give a value to the
   horizontal and vertical measurements upon a photographic
   picture, at once the subject changes and an addition
   to positive data is gained. (45)

If photography could fix images onto a precisely calibrated grid, it could become a useful tool for mapping, the primary activity of the survey. Until then, it could be of use only to disciplines less reliant on mathematics. Wheeler offered this assessment:

   It has been considered that the professional uses of photography,
   as an adjunct to a survey of this character, are few, so
   far comparatively little good beyond that which is of general
   interest as expressive of the scenic features of specified areas.
   The material gathered from its use apply [sic] only to the
   departments of geology and natural history. (46)

Wheeler prized mathematics above all other disciplines. In his opinion, cartography was much superior to sketching, and geodesy was much superior to geology, because the former disciplines were more quantitatively precise. (47) He routinely denigrated geology and natural history as "inexact" sciences, (48) and because photography shared in this inexactness, it was not yet for him an adequate instrument for surveying the West. (49)

O'Sullivan employed various strategies to overcome the failure of photography to deliver quantitative precision. One has already been noted: the pictorial introduction of familiar objects (often a human figure) to provide a sense of scale. By 1873 O'Sullivan and Wheeler were evidently dissatisfied with this strategy of approximation, because the photographer began to place a yardstick in his images (Fig. 7). The yardstick allowed viewers to convert the imagistic exactitude of photography into a quantitative precision.

Photography was not only analog but also indiscriminate. The condensation of significance delivered by the map, the table, and the report derived in part from the capacity of these modes of presentation to eliminate much of what was, from the perspective of the scientific imagination, the irrelevant noise that routinely flooded the visual field. (50) These modes isolated relevance and offered it in a reduced and readily apprehensible form. Over the years of the survey, techniques for making such highly legible reductions improved. For example, in the early years of the survey, hachuring was used to indicate the steepness of slopes on maps, whereas in later years, the more abbreviated and legible contour line was employed. (51) O'Sullivan's photography, although it shrank vistas onto small pieces of paper, nonetheless rather indiscriminately recorded the profuse particulars of the visual field, compromising its capacity for condensing significance.

The failure of photography to distill essentials was not total; O'Sullivan's pictures eliminated visual noise in two ways that brought them into closer kinship with most of the other graphic materials generated by the survey. The first was the absence of color. The second derived from the photographer's practice of masking out the mottled skies that the special sensitivity of the wet-collodion process to blue and ultraviolet light tended to foster. Instead of superimposing a sky from a separate exposure, O'Sullivan generally rendered the sky blank. (52) This practice was in keeping with the survey process; for topographers or geologists, cloud formations at any given moment were transient and incidental to the structure of a view. Masking out the sky could thus be understood as a way of eliminating a measure of photographic noise, as a pictorial analogue, one might say, to ignoring the heights of snowdrifts in the making of topographic maps. But the eradication of color and blank skies alone could not atone for the analog indiscriminateness of photography. The camera still tended toward the production of noisy clusters of qualitative, subjective, illegible, and inconvertible stuff.

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.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

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.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

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)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Pictorial Rhetoric

If O'Sullivan borrowed strategies and values from other graphic survey modes, he did so not only to compensate for photography's weaknesses but also to exploit its strengths. Given the state of technology in the 1870s, the photograph--however ingenious its maker--was unlikely to be as effective as the map, the chart, or the diagram at distilling essential information about the West for scientists, engineers, industrialists, and generals. But the photograph was a superior means of securing an image of the West and of the survey itself. (57) One of the claims of this essay is that besides making his photography more effective as a mode of survey work, O'Sullivan's borrowings from other specialists rendered Wheeler's survey work itself more accessible and ideal as an image.

Wheeler needed such images to further political aims. His survey required more than a set of field and office practices that processed materials and information; as a highly politicized enterprise, it also required lobbying and public relations. Photography, ostensibly a machine of knowledge, served him as a machine of promotion as well. (58) This would explain, among other things, why Wheeler emphasized photography's role in the production of lavish albums as much as he did its role in the production of illustrations for his reports. Perhaps the most revealing document in this regard is a letter he wrote to O'Sullivan in late November 1873. Wheeler had already returned to Washington, while O'Sullivan, who had been leading a side party for nearly two months, was still lugging his equipment through the increasingly snowy mountain passes of Colorado. (59) In the letter, Wheeler wrote:

     ... Lieut. Marshall reports it very cold in the mountains
   about Denver. In this matter of large sized photographs, I
   have only one desire that need be fulfilled, and that is to
   have 50 negatives, large size of this year sufficiently valuable
   to appear in elegantly bound Albums, of which I wish
   to publish at once from 50 to 100.
     I have 15 only suitable for this purpose from the lot sent
   in at first from Wingate.
     My first impression was that you would have more difficulties
   than you think in a northward trip from Santa Fe at
   this late day.
     However, suit yourself in this matter and communicate
   with the ranking officer of any party whom you meet or
   Mr. Klett, with a view to receiving any necessary facilities,
   not at your hand and this shall be your authority.
     I would like to have views of snow scenery, but it would
   not be well to sacrifice to[o] much time and trouble.
     About the albums for this year, I am also solicitous. I
   have given Mrs. O'Sullivan $10[0.sup.xx/100] and told her to
   apply for more if it be needed. (60)

This letter reveals not only the broad professional discretion O'Sullivan enjoyed in his field but also the high priority that Wheeler placed on the "elegantly bound" photograph albums produced by the survey. (61) It is remarkable that there is no mention in the letter of any scientific or topographic need for a particular subject, and that the only specific request was for a type of scenery. This suggests that although O'Sullivan's photography was bound up with other instrumental and scientific practices, it had its own peculiar functions related to its capacity to produce engaging pictures.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Wheeler's need for promotion stemmed from his insecure place in both history and the national political scene. His driving ambition was to establish himself within the pantheon of great explorers, but his belatedness made this a daunting task. The great military expeditions of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and of John Charles Fremont were long past, and even with respect to the instrumental surveys of the postwar era Wheeler had arrived late. By the time he took to the field in 1871, Ferdinand V. Hayden, John Wesley Powell, and King had already spent multiple seasons mapping and exploring the area between the Sierra Nevadas and the eastern foothills of the Rockies. (62) Competition arose among all four men and the federal institutions that sponsored them. Whereas the Department of War oversaw the efforts of King and Wheeler, Hayden was supported by the Department of the Interior, and Powell received funds from the Smithsonian Institution. Moreover, common institutional sponsorship did not preclude interpersonal competition. King, for example, was very reluctant to turn over unpublished materials and maps to Wheeler for fear of having his thunder stolen. (63)

In Wheeler's efforts to overcome the burden of his belatedness, he occasionally resorted to desperate, even bizarre, gambits. His stubborn insistence on navigating the Colorado River upstream was a direct consequence of the fact that Powell had already navigated it downstream. When O'Sullivan returned from El Morro with Historic Spanish Record of the Conquest (Fig. 7), Wheeler entertained the fanciful notion that the stray mark above the second digit of the inscribed year made it a 5 rather than a 7, a find that if confirmed would have demanded revising previous readings of the inscription and radically rewriting the history of the American Southwest. (64)

Wheeler was playing not only for the lofty stakes of historical standing but also for the mundane stakes of his survey's continued existence. Prior to each field season, Humphreys forwarded to Congress a request for a specific sum to cover the following season's work without any guarantee that Congress would provide the full amount requested--and, indeed, it rarely did. Thus, Wheeler had to wait until each spring to ascertain what funds (if any) he had available for that season's expedition, and he routinely scrambled to muster enough money to match his budget. (65) Each winter his survey team disbanded, to be reassembled only if he won another round of appropriations. Wheeler lamented the fact that "no preliminary arrangements other than of a very meager character can be made for the expedition of a season until action by Congress." (66)

Wheeler was keenly aware of governmental oversight and his need to impress certain members of the House and Senate and his superiors in the Department of War. Even before Humphreys provided him with $50,000 from a general appropriation for military surveys in 1871, members of Congress were keeping tabs on his activities. (67) In March 1872, the United States Senate passed a resolution requesting information from the Department of War on the progress of the survey. (68) By May of that year, Wheeler was entreating members of Congress directly. (69) Wheeler's support became more precarious over time. The financial panic of 1873 and the Townsend hearings of the following year, wherein Congress considered the merits of consolidating all survey work under a single governmental agency, eliminated all financial certainties. (70) In 1874, when Congress appropriated only $30,000 of the $90,000 that Wheeler estimated that he required, (71) Wheeler had to plead with Humphreys to secure funds to cover the shortfall from the War Department's general budget for Surveys for Military Defenses. (72) When these monies proved inadequate, Wheeler sought support from the Quartermaster Department. (73) Over the years that O'Sullivan worked in the field, Wheeler received funds from several sources, but inevitably he clamored for more. (74)

In the effort to establish both his survey's historical standing and its political viability, Wheeler enlisted the powers of photography. (75) As soon as the 1871 field season ended, he began pressing selected pictures by O'Sullivan into the hands of those whose support he required. (76) He and Humphreys also brought them before the eyes of the public, displaying photographs by O'Sullivan and Bell at the Vienna Exposition of 1873 and the Louisville Industrial Exposition of the same year. (77) To raise funds for his photographic production, Wheeler commissioned the private firm of E. and H. T. Anthony and Company of New York to print and sell stereographs from the 1871 and 1872 field seasons (he attempted to strike a similar deal with the company to sell full-plate prints, but the parties failed to come to satisfactory terms). (78) In the end, the sales of stereographs were meager, and the vast majority of people who saw O'Sullivan's photographs from the survey saw them at public expositions, often as full-plate prints rather than stereographs. (79)

By the spring of 1874, with the economy distressed and calls for consolidating the federal surveys of the West intensifying, Wheeler had become desperate to obtain greater Congressional support and redoubled his efforts at producing photographs to distribute within the Capitol. After much urging from Wheeler, Humphreys persuaded the secretary of war to allocate funds for a massive photographic production, and in the three-month period between November 24, 1874, and February 23, 1875, Wheeler's records indicate that his office distributed sets of twenty-five or fifty landscape photographs from the 1871-73 field seasons to no fewer than (by my count) twenty-nine senators, representatives, or territorial delegates, many of whom chaired important congressional committees. (80)

In all their endeavors to secure political support, Wheeler and his fellow survey leaders faced a dilemma. Short of discovering rare ores, the most valuable results of the surveys consisted of maps, charts, books of observations and measurements, and other technical materials. To many, such materials were dull, arcane, or inscrutable. The pictorial arts, including photography, allowed the leaders of the surveys to glean and deliver something charismatic and accessible from their labors. But--and this was the second horn of the dilemma--these pictures attracted criticism as superfluous souvenirs. (81)

Long before Wheeler received his charge, survey leaders had established the practice of augmenting their reports with lavish illustrations, often of dubious scientific value. Not surprisingly, survey leaders in their correspondence and writings tended to avoid discussing why such extensive illustration was necessary. Others, however, were not always so reticent. Prior to the Civil War, when Henry Rowe Schoolcraft set out to compile a history of Indian tribes, George Gibbs, a Harvard-educated lawyer and later explorer of the Pacific Northwest, advised him:

   Make your reports to each Session upon the material & the
   tangible, and above all things have them full of plates.
   Congress will print them of course & pay for the engraving
   without writhing. I should if possible give them a small
   taste at the commencement of the very next session, just to
   make their mouths water for more, as you bait round your
   intended fishing place while you fix your lines. One of the
   elementary powers at Washington, the government
   printer, is of course easily propitiated. ...
     .... So long as those devils [in Congress] can count on an
   illustrated work every session, so long will they make the
   appropriation. ... Your great work should be your "final Report"
   --and for this I should take as much time & demand as
   many draughtsmen from the office as I could get. (82)

Gibb's take on the political value of report illustrations was cynical but not without merit; one explorer after another did well by acting consistently with his advice.

The production of survey illustrations in the 1860s and 1870s proved exceedingly expensive. When Congress appropriated $25,000 to the Wheeler survey in 1874 for the production of its final report--only $5,000 less than it appropriated for his expedition that year--Wheeler complained that the amount was sufficient to cover illustration costs only, and he later received additional funds. (83) Twenty-five thousand dollars in 1874 was equivalent to approximately $500,000 of today's dollars and represented several times the proportion of total federal outlays than the latter figure represents today. One can imagine that authorizing such a sum to illustrate a report had the potential to make Congress squirm.

Many members of Congress were evidently happy to milk the public coffers to fund this ongoing pictorial production, the results of which were then returned to them to solicit their political support. But the legitimacy of this circuit was always a sensitive issue, and several politicians over the years made political hay by posturing with displeasure at the extravagant productions of survey illustrations and illustrated reports. In 1860, when Congress was debating a proposed appropriation for distributing duplicates of specimens in the government's scientific collections, Senator John P. Hale of New Hampshire declared:

   I should like the country to know how much we have spent
   for printing pictures of bugs, reptiles, etc., that these exploring
   expeditions have brought here. ... It has cost us millions
   of dollars to print these pictures, and now we are going to
   spend $10,000 to distribute them after spending millions to
   print pictures of them. The thing is all wrong, sir. (84)

In the same debate, Senator Simon Cameron, who would soon become President Lincoln's secretary of war, issued his own diatribe:

   I am tired of all this thing called science here. It was only
   the other day we made another appropriation in regard to
   the expedition which Captain Wilkes took out to the Pacific
   Ocean. We have paid $1,000 a volume for the book
   which he published. Who has ever seen that book outside
   of this Senate, and how many copies are there of it in this
   country? We have spent millions in that sort of thing for
   the last few years, and it is time it should be stopped. (85)

Cameron's rant was a bit of political grandstanding, of course, but the most pointed question within it--"Who has ever seen [Wilkes's report] outside of this Senate?"--implicitly raised the serious and delicate issue of whether survey publications were functioning more as promotional fluff than scientific substance. Although Cameron's words have been justly cited as an example of thick-skulled resistance to the advancement of knowledge, (86) there is a difference between being tired of science and being tired of "this thing called science here" (my emphasis). The fact that survey leaders had every reason to use funds from Congress to produce expensive promotional materials aimed at Congress gave them a strong incentive, at least while in the nation's capital, to call something science that primarily functioned as advertising.

Photography did not escape the doubts attending the costly production of survey pictures. In 1877, Representative William Piper of California railed against an appropriation for Hayden with the following outburst:

     I will venture to say that there is no gentleman on this
   floor who can point [to] one single item of advantage to
   the people or to the nation that has accrued from these
   explorations. It is true they take a great many stereoscopic
   views which are circulated about this House; in fact I have
   quite a box of them myself. They are very nice things for
   young gentlemen to amuse young ladies with, but I believe
   that is the only thing they are useful for, and I think that,
   in view of the depleted state of the Treasury and the vast
   burdens of taxation which the people have been enduring,
   this appropriation should be stricken out and the money
   applied to some purpose that will be of some benefit to the
   people of the country. (87)

Journalists occasionally joined the critical assault. The witheringly satirical Capital made this claim on behalf of Hayden:

   The crowning achievement of his life, and the one he
   deserves most credit for, is the establishment of his national
   Congressional photographic gallery on the Avenue.
   In this gallery are turned out the thousands of photographs
   so lavishly distributed where they may do the most
   good, according to popular report. (88)

Other evidence suggests that these biting remarks regarding Hayden's promotional uses of photography were not unwarranted. (89)

Because survey illustrations were susceptible to the charge of being frivolous embellishments or, worse, attractive bribes directed at a cupidinous Congress, every explorer had an incentive to justify their necessity on other grounds. Lt. Edward G. Beckwith, who completed the survey of the thirty-eighth parallel, went so far as to insist explicitly in his report that the illustrations were not for contemplative pleasure: "The landscape views are presented with no purpose of representing the beauties of the scenery of the country, but to illustrate its general character, and to exhibit on a small scale the character of its mountains and canones, and of its plains and valleys. ..." (90) According to a rationale such as this, beauty was at most an incidental quality of a picture otherwise justified. Like Beckwith and other survey leaders, Wheeler had an incentive to deliver pictorial attractions under a more legitimate guise.

O'Sullivan's practice responded in manifold ways to the dilemma of using pictures purchased by Congress to lobby for expedition funding. First, his pictures tended to show members of the survey engaged in work and oblivious to the visual appeal of their surroundings. Black Canon, Colorado River, from Camp 8, Looking Above, one of his most reproduced photographs from the 1871 journey up the Colorado River (it appeared in multiple albums and was reproduced as a lithograph for a survey report) offers an excellent example (Fig. 3). In the midst of a balanced composition, the river opens out, sweeping dramatically across the midground, a rectangle of reflected light radiating at the picture's center. While this graphic display of motion and stasis proffers itself to the viewer, the member of the expedition hunched in a boat pays it no mind: he sits with his back to the central scene and evidently writes in a notebook that rests in his lap. In all probability, the appeal of this photograph to O'Sullivan and Wheeler derived from its simultaneous insistence that the scenery deliver itself to the viewer and that the survey itself was not about that delivery but instead about the practical and productive process of translating the West to the page.

It is worth noting in passing that this same negotiation may explain O'Sullivan's apparent disregard for the exquisiteness of his own pictures. The cropped bodies, uneven horizons, and conspicuous scratched-out plate numbers on his negatives all distinguish O'Sullivan's work from the fastidiously perfect products of his contemporary Carleton Watkins, leaving scholars puzzled as to why a photographer of such remarkable skills and sensitivity would have brooked such apparent defects. But these signs of carelessness suggest a practical, unfussy approach to depiction for which the delivery of beauty is but a secondary effect. Both O'Sullivan and the slumped figure in the boat highlight their utilitarian disposition by conspicuously disregarding aesthetic possibilities. Neither blocked the viewer's access to the pictorial plenitude of the landscape, but that plenitude came across as incidental to survey work.

Two other ways in which O'Sullivan's practice responded to the promotional dilemma correspond to the (sometimes blurred) distinction between a political favor and an advertisement. The first is relatively simple: by borrowing tactics and values from other survey specialists, O'Sullivan gave his photographs a scientific gloss, thus rendering them, as political favors, better suited to escape the censure of whistle-blowers in the capital. Although a picture such as Snow Peaks may have had an odd, severe attraction, it did not look like a conventional landscape and, hence, not like a gratuitous perquisite. In this respect, it is notable that Hayden, and not Wheeler, bore the brunt of accusations concerning the use of photographs as promotional materials even though both men were rather shamelessly distributing them to the most powerful members of Congress. The Western views of Hayden's photographer, William Henry Jackson, conformed more steadfastly to landscape conventions and bore fewer signs of graphic translation. The second and more subtle way that O'Sullivan's practice responded to the promotional dilemma entailed making pictures that imagined the survey as a process. By borrowing tactics and values from his colleagues, O'Sullivan fashioned photographs with special capacities to represent the productive work of surveys generally and that of the Wheeler survey in particular. (91)

For example, in Black Canon (Fig. 3), as in Ancient Ruins and Snow Peaks (Figs. 1, 2), the scenery itself has seemingly begun to conform to the graphic demands of survey work. In particular, the manufactured geometries of the boat mingle evocatively with the natural shapes of the surrounding scene: the gunwales echo the curving shoreline, the mast reiterates the vertical limits of the brightly lit river surface, whose rectangular shape appears again in the covered box in the boat, and the triangle of mast, stay, and gunwale, in which the figure is inscribed, offers an emblem for the geometric framing of the survey process as a whole. (92) Whether these intricate coordinations of natural morphology and survey equipment were premeditated, recognized afterward, or only unconsciously assessed is impossible to say. But the delicate ways in which this photograph provided both pictorial pleasures and assurances that a more pragmatic visual order was being secured certainly accommodated the historical circumstances.

We cannot reasonably draw a bright line between the scientific and the promotional in O'Sullivan's practice, but there is reason to believe that promotional concerns played a greater role in informing his work than has generally been assumed. In many instances he may have been performing science, in the sense of making a public display of it, more than seeking to further its objectives.

In particular, his photographs that partook of the visual mode of specimen collection may have mimicked this mode for promotional purposes more than they adopted it to maximize scientific knowledge. The principal evidence giving rise to this suspicion is O'Sullivan's unscientific and scant sampling of specimens from explored regions. Although several photographs of things as specimens appeared in survey publications and exposition displays, they were not part of an extensive photographic taxonomy: O'Sullivan took only a smattering of pictures in which a botanical or geologic subject appeared in this manner. From the point of view of constructing a taxonomic archive, the choice of subjects was arbitrary; one would strive in vain to discern a basis within the natural sciences for the decision to photograph the melon cactus and not the ocotillo, senita, pincushion, or cholla. It is possible, of course, that O'Sullivan was merely trying to make his medium as scientifically useful as possible within the limits of his equipment and supplies. But nowhere in the survey correspondence does Wheeler or O'Sullivan complain about not having sufficient glass plates to complete taxonomic records, and Wheeler seemed perfectly happy to continue to reproduce the same few images of cacti, trees, and rocks. The evidence suggests, in short, that O'Sullivan did not attempt to construct an archive of the species and geomorphological particulars of the West but, rather, a small number of his photographs allowed him to represent the activity of specimen collection as if he had. By offering up photographs as collected specimens, his practice harnessed photography's persuasive realism, reliability, and sense of presence to a survey activity that in fact lay largely outside its scope.

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)

It was, of course, in O'Sullivan's interest to promote the Wheeler survey in particular and not just survey work in general. The surveys of Hayden, Powell, and King were also collecting specimens, mapping terrain, and scaling rock walls, and the belated Wheeler needed ways to distinguish his survey from those of his peers. Unfortunately for him, the expertise of his rivals in geology, ethnography, and other domains of scientific inquiry generally surpassed his own. While he could claim to compete in the quality and scope of his cartography and geodetic work, the truly distinguishing feature of his survey was its military tenor. Although King also led expeditions for the Department of War, Wheeler was a military officer, and he alone among the leaders of the principal postwar surveys tended to keep military concerns at the forefront of his work. If the promotional hypothesis is robust, then we would expect that O'Sullivan sought to make photographs laying claim to the special value of this emphasis.

Indeed, many of his photographs served this distinguishing function, including Ancient Ruins. The officials for whom Wheeler needed to appeal for support would have associated this view of Canyon de Chelly with a conflict that took place there less than a decade before the picture was made. In 1863-64, Gen. James Carleton and Kit Carson drove resisting Navajos into the canyon, burning their peach orchards and threatening them with starvation. This violent suppression devastated the morale of other Navajo resisters in the region, who surrendered in great numbers. (95) The photograph thus offered not simply a symbolic imprimatur to Euro-American occupation of the West generally, but also a celebration and promise of the military's role in making that occupation possible. The photograph would have reminded viewers of recent military operations and the ongoing need for an army presence (expeditionary and otherwise) in the West. (96) The rhetoric of the image thus merged scientific possession (the West as diagram) with military occupation, a nexus that served to distinguish and elevate the particular mission that O'Sullivan and Wheeler served.

Such more tailored promotional strategies show themselves most clearly in O'Sullivan's photographs of American Indians. Although by the 1870s the general shift in the fine and graphic arts was toward idealized representations of American Indians as a benign and vanishing race, the motivations for Wheeler and his staff were not entirely consonant with this trend. The army had an incentive to celebrate the regional security already obtained by military force while insisting that safety and stability could not be taken for granted. The motivation behind this insistence was threefold. First, Wheeler's employer, the Department of War, sought to maintain its substantial presence in the West, which it could more easily do if insecurity remained a threat. Second, Wheeler's survey was specifically geared toward providing information germane to military needs, such as troop movement and fort placement, and so would possess an advantage over other surveys if those needs remained vital. (97) Third, sending out soldiers to do survey work would presumably be more logical if the areas to be traversed still posed significant risks of strife and violence. (98) One of the key issues of the 1874 congressional hearings on consolidation was whether surveys still required military escorts. (99) For all these reasons, Wheeler had a special incentive to represent the West as still simmering with the possibility of violent eruption. O'Sullivan's photographs of American Indians negotiated this issue carefully, depicting a security achieved militarily but in need of ongoing maintenance.

The photograph View on Apache Lake, Sierra Blanca Range, Arizona, which was often featured in survey materials and displays, exemplifies this negotiation (Fig. 11). Here, O'Sullivan made use of the visual rhetoric of collection and display to portray a West secure only by means of continued military oversight. Two Apache guides and two Euro-Americans rest on the shore of a mountain lake. O'Sullivan rhetorically framed the guide sitting on the rock in the lake as a collected specimen (Fig. 12). The figure squats froglike on a boulder, a collapsed pictorial depth making him appear smaller than human size. The numeral 3, which O'Sullivan scratched into the photographic plate at the compilation stage of the survey process, secured for Apache and rock the look of an exhibit (such numerical tags can be found in diagrams and displays from many survey publications). The pictorial rhetoric of collection operates in this picture within a structure of surveillance. O'Sullivan employed an unusually shallow depth of field to cabin the Apache figures in a narrow layer of optical scrutiny. The tow scouts, with their conspicuously held rifles, endure the supervision of the two Euro-American members of the expedition party, who line the right side of the image, pinning the Apache figures between them and the lake.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The photograph posits an association between the Apache figures and disorder. Although many rounded boulders lay along the water's edge (one can discern this from other photographs of the lake), O'Sullivan chose as a perch for the central Apache figure a boulder with a sheer side facing the camera. Once again, in collecting impressions on his full plates, O'Sullivan skewed the translation process to favor the self-exhibiting, marked surface. The surface of this boulder, however, is exceedingly unlike the regular, aesthetically appealing geologic surfaces that O'Sullivan generally selected; shattering cracks run helter-skelter across it. O'Sullivan's camera has recorded the reticular array of fractures, gouges, and chips with mesmerizing precision. The result is a carefully obtained specimen of unintelligible nature, of garbled geologic syntax.

This pictorial association between American Indians and graphic chaos would have suited a military that could promise to secure order through force and supervision, and the rhetoric of Apache Lake echoes that of the Wheeler survey as a whole. Wheeler himself despised what he perceived to be the flux and chaos of much Indian life. He said of the Apaches, "The secret of their great terror to the whites is their lawless and roving life." (100) He insisted that "Mountain Indians" belonged to a "wild, roving breed" and that their "lawless and migratory" ways had "carried them beyond the notion of anything like order, even among their own people." (101) This disorder allegedly extended to the syntactic. Survey chronicler Frederick Loring reported in one of his dispatches that "Indian talk is something like baby-talk in its utter disjointedness." (102)

The specific strategy of reading a rock face as an expressive corollary to the character of local Indians was implicitly en- dorsed by Wheeler. In a discussion of another locale in his final report, he wrote:

   The eroded walls of lime and sandstone are basalt-capped,
   presenting every variety of contour, black, ugly, and frowning,
   with escarpments impossible of ascent or descent,
   except in friendly openings where the drainage of minor
   side ravines had cut out more gentle slopes. This region
   was the stronghold of the Apache-Mohaves, where they
   had hunted and fished for unnumbered generations, and
   more lately murdered to their heart's content. (103)

In View on Apache Lake, O'Sullivan presented the randomly cracked rock surface as if its gibberish bore some strong relation to the purported chaos and unintelligibility of the Apaches themselves. The marks on the rock face constitute a geologic analogue to the disjointed, degenerate syntax that Loring attributed to American Indian speech. The scout rests the butt of his rifle in a particularly salient gouge in the rock face, a gesture that may have reinforced the suggestion that he possessed a brutish degenerative backwardness. The clarity with which the numeral 3 has been scratched into the image of the stone on the photographic plate juxtaposes the violent and incoherent natural writing on the rock, associated with the Apache figure, with the clear and rational notation of O'Sullivan himself. The photograph conveyed the survey's promise that through both scientific investigations and military oversight it could keep the potential chaos of the region and its inhabitants at bay.

Concern for promoting the distinctive emphases and expertise of the Wheeler survey may help account more generally for O'Sullivan's proclivity toward representing American Indian men in a state of contained servitude or idleness. Whereas Apache Lake is an example of the former, Aboriginal Life among the Navajoe Indians: Near Old Fort Defiance (Fig. 13) is an example of the latter. This photograph, ostensibly collecting a specimen of "aboriginal life," bears signs of industry (the woman weaving) and agriculture (the ears of corn in the tree), but also signs of idleness and danger (the disengaged, disgruntled-looking men, one of whom is armed). The latter signs crowd around and largely eclipse the former; the viewer who seeks out the working hands of the woman finds instead the nexus of a young man's bow and arrow. The camera has enforced a strict containment of the figures in a packed image and a crowded depth of field, a pictorial counterpart to the army's containment of the Navajos on reservation lands in the wake of General Carleton's campaign against resistance. The image associates a necessary containment with a tenuous security.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The Torque of the Subject

The argument of this essay has made three principal claims: that O'Sullivan borrowed tactics and values from the graphic modes of other survey specialists, and that he did so, on the one hand, to make photography a superior instrument of survey work and, on the other hand, to enhance his photographs as promotional materials. These claims do not require any subsidiary claims about O'Sullivan's subjectivity. The motivations thus far ascribed to his practice are objective, deriving from the technical, institutional, and political determinants exerting themselves on it. (104)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

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.

With or without these qualifications, the argument presented here raises general issues about the study of nineteenth-century expedition photography. One issue is whether it is time to move away from the long-standing concern with locating this category of practice relative to the changing historical border between art and science. Such attempts have tended to neglect the complex visual culture of the latter and the role of rhetoric in its ongoing constitution as well as to superimpose a discourse belonging to salon reviews and amateur photography journals on a distant photographic domain. (106) A second issue is whether the moment has come to bring more nuance and historical specificity to the intersection of United States expeditionary practices and larger ideological operations of nationalism and Manifest Destiny. While efforts at establishing the very fact of such an intersection have been necessary, scholarship in the field has at times fostered the impression that photographic practices proceeded in lockstep conformity to an evolving national ideology. However much one may want to resist a resubscription to the notion of photographer as author, the practices of particular expeditionary photographers were very differently situated in the political fabric. Wheeler's correspondence, for example, bears many more signs of local anxiety than lofty ideals, in part because his relationship to several larger ideological schemes was troublesome. For example, in the years of the Grant administration, the military found itself increasingly criticized and alienated, and Wheeler shared in the sense of persecution that pervaded the ranks. As a result, he was much more loyal to the United States Army than to his government at large, and any nationalist pride Wheeler felt in the unfolding of Manifest Destiny would have been mitigated and inflected by his deep grievances in this regard. (107) A third issue raised by this essay is how common it was for nineteenth-century photographers embedded in collective, instrumental enterprises to draw on the values, tactics, and graphic conventions of their fellow specialists. My own rummaging in archives suggests that while it was unusual, O'Sullivan was not the only photographer to have borrowed in this manner. Finally, this argument raises questions about how we can best write the history of modernism in photography. One irony of the leading critiques of curatorial attempts to integrate survey photography into a history of modernism is that they have implicitly accepted that the pictorial values and strategies of flatness, geometric distillation, and graphic signification belonged exclusively to modernist practice, and hence that the apprehension of such values in early photographs could be explained only as an anachronism. This essay has marshaled evidence and argument to show that we have good reason to believe that these values and strategies emerged within photography before modernist photography proper got under way. The relevant historical materials, however, suggest that this emergence derived not from an autonomous investigation of the medium and its limits but instead from the deep embeddedness of survey photography in an instrumental matrix of graphic disciplines.

Frequently Cited Sources

BL2: Letters Sent (press copies), Geographical Surveys West of the 100th Meridian Papers, vol. 2, New Haven, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale Collection of Western Americana

BL4: Letters (press copies), Geographical Surveys West of the 100th Meridian Papers, vol. 4, New Haven, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale Collection of Western Americana

CELR: Letters Received, Office of the Chief of Engineers, General Record Division, RG 77, entry 52, Washington, D.C., National Archives

CELS: Letters Sent, Office of the Chief of Engineers, General Record Division, RG 77, entry 47, National Archives

DR: Distribution Record of Reports, Memoranda, and Atlas Sheets, Office of U.S. Geographical Surveys West of the 100th Meridian, RG 77, entry 388A, National Archives

WLS: Letters Sent, Office of U.S. Geographical Surveys West of the 100th Meridian, RG 77, entry 362, National Archives

WR: Records of the Wheeler Survey, Records of the Accounting Officers of the Department of the Treasury, RG 217, entry 735, National Archives

Wheeler, George M., et al., 1872, Preliminary Report of Explorations in Nevada and Arizona (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office [GPO]).

--, 1874, Annual Report upon the Geographical Explorations and Surveys West of the One Hundredth Meridian in California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Montana (Washington, D.C.: GPO).

Robin E. Kelsey is assistant professor of history of art at Harvard University. He is preparing a book on survey photography [Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. 02138].

COPYRIGHT 2003 College Art Association
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning