“Double Exposure,” by Robert Sullivan (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Timothy O’Sullivan came west after the Civil War to take pictures of the landscape and the indigenous people for the Clarence King and George Wheeler geological surveys. The photographs he left behind are both documentation and art.
Ansel Adams, who discovered O’Sullivan’s work in the late 1930s, called the photographs “surrealistic and disturbing” (although he complained that they were “technically deficient”).
Although O’Sullivan’s photographs are well known, the photographer’s life is largely undocumented. He left behind no letters or diaries. He died of tuberculosis in 1882 at the age of 42, and even his gravesite is unknown. So Sullivan’s “Double Exposure” is not a biography but a “survey,” he writes.
A photographer himself, the author set out on a years-long search for the sites of O’Sullivan’s most famous photographs. The result is a book that includes a personal journey, observations, history, photographs and their interpretation, and available biographical information. Much of that comes from Clarence King’s highly romanticized and exaggerated account of O’Sullivan and his work.
Most of O’Sullivan’s time in the West was spent in California and Nevada, but he did photograph the Colorado River as part of the Wheeler survey. Sullivan calls the survey a “fraud” and a “hyped up adventure,” since the river already had been explored. In fact, for O’Sullivan, it was likely a commercial venture since he hoped to sell copies of his photographs to the public. Those copies are now in libraries and art museums.
Sandra Dallas is a Denver author and book reviewer.
