Timothy O'Sullivan
For Timothy O'Sullivan reality was more than the literal, direct and 'physical' reflection of the world. Truth, was simple and direct, but came from small adjustments in the literal reality that brought into play the subjective. His camera portrayed the way a place seemed rather than how it actually was.
O'Sullivan learn't his technique from documenting the American civil war. Cameras of the period could not catch the action, as they do today, and this fact forced him to build a reality of war from mundane scenes that stood around the action; the context of war.
Later in 1871 O'Sullivan joined the United States Geographical Surveys West of the One Hundredth Meridian led by Lt. George Wheeler. The purpose was to survey the land for possible future occupation, while also gaining a consensus of the Native American population. His photographs were to be used to prepare the 'Wild' West as an inviting destination for progress, not only for the sake of civilization, but for the continued funding of the surveys.
Leaders of the surveys such as King, Lt. George M. Wheeler, and J.W. Powell tended to use the beautiful, picturesque, and sublime ideologies in writing their survey reports, and hence their hired photographers usually resorted to them as well. But O'Sullivan was unique. While fulfilling the requirements of the survey he was also able to pursue his own instinct for truth and art using devices he had learnt during the civil war.
Though he photographed completely without public acclaim during his life time, he is now renowned for his ability to amplify the telluric beauty of the geological Western American landscape by means of very simple but understated techniques. For example, the top photograph in the accompanying strip of images, depicts Canyon De Chelly, New Mexico, 1873, and shows how he ever-so-slightly tilts the camera's angle to exaggerate the great towering rocks height and weight over the tiny encampment below in the valley.
Jonathan Green in "American Photography" presents Timothy O'Sullivan as something of a photographic renegade. Unlike Muybridge, for example, who added clouds to his picturesque scenic images by using his 'Sky Shade'(1) technique, O'Sullivan seems to accept the limitations of his medium. He exploited, instead, the starkness arising from the wet collodion processes lack of sensitivity to blue, by sometimes integrating the white sky into a series of balanced shades and planes of the geology creating an almost abstract image (image 2).
If there is an answer to endless question: what is reality, surely here we have it in O'Sullivan's images, and as valid today as it was then.
In Elizabeth Paul's words:
"His approach accepts the limitations of subjectivity and photography to discern and portray the whole truth or reality of a subject, and seeks, instead, to gain and portray an impression of the subject truthfully, accurately, and effectively." ~ see her excellent thesis on the subject
(1) Muybridge solved the problem using two different methods:
a - He combined a negative of clouds with a negative of a landscape, when making a print.
b - Muybridge also used a board flap inside his camera to block the brighter light from the sky during a portion of an exposure. He called the feature a sky shade.
Submitted by Philip Cartland on 7 January 2008 - 8:31am.