Timothy O'Sullivan

Beaumont Newhall and Nancy Newhall, T. H. O'Sullivan: Photographer (Rochester: The George Eastman House, 1966), pl. 37

James D. Horan, Timothy O'Sullivan: America's Forgotten Photographer (New York, 1966), p. 310

Joel Snyder, American Frontiers: Photographs of Timothy H. O'Sullivan, 1867-1874 (Aperture, 1981), p. 95

Rick Dingus, The Photographic Artifacts of Timothy O'Sullivan (Albuquerque, 1982), fig. 17

Weston J. Naef and James N. Wood, Era of Exploration: The Rise of Landscape Photography in the American West, 1860-1885 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, 1975), pl. 62

Dover Publications, Wheeler's Photographic Survey of the American West, 1871-1873 (New York, 1983), frontispiece and pl. 41

Daniel Wolf, The American Space: Meaning in Nineteenth-Century Landscape Photography (Middletown, 1983), pl. 58

Oliver Mathews, Early Photographs and Early Photographers: a Survey in Dictionary Form (London, 1973), pl. 138

Robin Kelsey, Archive Style: Photographs & Illustrations for U. S. Surveys, 1850 - 1890 (Berkeley, 2007), fig. 1, p. 2

Timothy O'Sullivan's Cañon de Chelle is among the very best of nineteenth-century Survey photographs. During the 1873 expedition to the American Southwest led by Lt. George M. Wheeler, Timothy O’Sullivan photographed the Canyon de Chelle, derived from the Navajo word meaning 'among the cliffs.’ Located in the northeast corner of Arizona, the Canyon de Chelle was still inhabited by Navajo when the Survey party arrived, but the cliff-dwellings had long been abandoned. O'Sullivan's photograph captures the 'White House Ruins' in the sweep of rock that rises to the rim of the canyon located hundreds of feet beyond the picture's frame. 

When Ansel Adams made his own view of the cliff-dwellings in 1942, he wrote to curators Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, 'I photographed the White House Ruins from almost the identical spot and time of the O'Sullivan picture!!' (Ansel Adams: Letters 1916 -1984, p. 136). Adams owned a print of the photograph offered here, which he loaned to Newhall's pioneering 1937 exhibition of photography at The Museum of Modern Art.  When Alfred Stieglitz saw this O'Sullivan image in the installation, he declared, 'Nothing better has been done' (ibid., p. 126).