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Timothy H. O'Sullivan
(From Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia)
Timothy H. O'Sullivan (c. 1840 – January 14, 1882) was a
photographer prominent for his work on subjects in the American Civil War
and the Western United States.
"The Harvest of Death": Union dead on the battlefield at Gettysburg,
Pennsylvania, photographed July 5–6, 1863, by Timothy O'SullivanO'Sullivan
was born in New York City. As a teenager, he was employed by Mathew Brady.
When the Civil War began in early 1861, he was commissioned a first
lieutenant in the Union Army and, over the next year, fought in Beaufort,
Port Royal, Fort Walker, and Fort Pulaski.
After being honorably discharged, he rejoined Brady's team. In July 1862,
O'Sullivan followed the campaign of Maj. Gen. John Pope's Northern
Virginia Campaign. By joining Alexander Gardner's studio, he had his
forty-four photographs published in the first Civil War photographs
collection, Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War. In July 1863,
he created his most famous photograph, "The Harvest of Death," depicting
dead soldiers from the Battle of Gettysburg. In 1864, following Gen.
Ulysses S. Grant's trail, he photographed the Siege of Petersburg before
briefly heading to North Carolina to document the siege of Fort Fisher.
That brought him to the Appomattox Court House, the site of Robert E.
Lee's surrender in April 1865.
From 1867 to 1869, he was official photographer on the United States
Geological Exploration of the 40th Parallel under Clarence King. The
expedition began at Virginia City, Nevada, where he photographed the
mines, and worked eastward. His job was to photograph the West to attract
settlers. O'Sullivan's pictures were among the first to record the
prehistoric ruins, Navajo weavers, and pueblo villages of the Southwest.
In contrast to the Asian and Eastern landscape fronts, the subject matter
he focused on was a new concept. It involved taking pictures of nature as
an untamed, un-industrialized land without the use of landscape painting
conventions. O'Sullivan combined science and art, making exact records of
extraordinary beauty.
In 1870 he joined a survey team in Panama to survey for a canal across the
isthmus. From 1871 to 1874 he returned to the southwestern United States
to join Lt. George M. Wheeler's survey west of the One Hundredth Meridian.
He faced starvation on the Colorado River when some of expedition's boats
capsized; few of the 300 negatives he took survived the trip back East. He
spent the last years of his short life in Washington, D.C., as official
photographer for the U.S. Geological Survey and the Treasury Department.
O'Sullivan died in Staten Island of tuberculosis at age 42.
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Ancient Ruins in the Canyon de Chelle, New Mexico, 1873.
Albumen print-International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House,
Rochester, N.Y.
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A Harvest of
Death, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania , 1863
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Group of Confederate Prisoners
at Fairfax Court-House, Virginia
June 1863
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Fissure Vent of Steamboat Springs
1867
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Savage-Cage, Virginia City
1867
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Rocks Carved by Drifting Sand, Arizona
1871
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Miner at Work, Comstock Lode, 1867
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Mojave men
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General Grant and his General Staff
1864
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The Gould and Curry Mill,
Virginia City, Nevada
1867
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Sand Dunes, Carson Desert
1867
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Tufa Domes,
Pyramid Lake
1867
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Vermillion
Creek Canyon
1867
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Black Canyon, Colorado River, from Camp 8, Looking above
1871
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