TIMOTHY O'SULLIVAN | 'CAÑON DE CHELLE, WALLS OF THE GRAND CAÑON ABOUT 1200 FEET IN HEIGHT'

Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, T. H. O'Sullivan: Photographer (Rochester: George Eastman House, 1966), pl. 36

James D. Horan, Timothy O'Sullivan: America's Forgotten Photographer (New York, 1966), p. 311

Weston Naef and James Wood, Era of Exploration (Buffalo and New York, 1975), pl. 63

Joel Snyder, American Frontiers: The Photographs of Timothy H. O'Sullivan, 1867-1874 (Aperture, 1981), p. 93

Dover Publications, Wheeler's Photographic Survey of the American West, 1871-1873 (New York, 1983), pl. 46

Toby Jurovics, Carol M. Johnson, Glenn Willumson, and William F. Stapp, Framing The West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O'Sullivan (Washington, D. C.: Library of Congress and Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2010), pl. 89

In the years following the Civil War, the United States of America experienced a golden age of survey photography.  Photographer Timothy O’Sullivan joined Lieutenant George M. Wheeler’s 1871 and 1872 survey party in exploring and documenting the geology of the United States west of the one-hundredth meridian for the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers. In his essay Viewing the Archive: Timothy O’Sullivan’s Photographs for the Wheeler Survey, 1871-74 (The Art Bulletin, vol. 85, no. 4, 2003), historian Robin Kelsey describes in detail the complex history of the printing of Wheeler Survey photographs. Between 1874 and 1878, albums comprising either 25 or 50 photographs were produced. Plate sequencing varied depending upon the album size, as did the decorative cartouche on the mount. The print of Cañon de Chelle offered here – with plate number ‘12’ in letterpress on the mount and cartouche with half-garland – was likely originally from an album of 25 photographs.