Viewing the archive: Timothy O'Sullivan's photographs for the Wheeler survey, 1871-74

Art Bulletin

Volumn 85, Issue 4, 2003, Pages 702-723

  Kelsey, Robin E ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 40249087522     PISSN: 00043079     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3177366     Document Type: Article

References (22)

1. Beaumont Newhall, Photography, 1839-1937 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1937), 105
2. For the most influential challenge to the integration of O'Sullivan's survey photography into a history of modernism, see Rosalind Krauss, "Photography's Discursive Spaces," in The Originality of the Avant-Garde-and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 131-50
3. Alexander H. Wyant, Diary
4. John Samson, "Photographs from the High Rockies," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 39 (Sept. 1869): 465-75
5. The geologist may have been shooting the rabbit for food, but he almost certainly desired the eagle as a specimen. The literature on specimen collection has grown richly in recent years. See, for example, David Brigham, "'Ask the Beasts and They Shall Teach Thee': The Human Lessons of Charles Willson Peale's Natural History Displays," in Art and Science in America: Issues of Representation, ed. Amy R. W. Meyers (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1998), 10-34
6. George M. Wheeler et al., Annual Report upon the Geographical Explorations and Surveys West of the One Hundredth Meridian (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1875), 5
7. Wheeler to Humphreys, July 31, 1873, BL2, 127-28
8. Wheeler to Julius Bien and Co., Dec. 6, 1873, BL2, 258-59
9. There were other goals as well. For an analysis of the process of scientific mobilization, see Bruno Latour, "Drawing Things Together," in Representation in Scientific Practice, ed. Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 19-68
10. Wheeler to Humphreys, June 20, 1873, BL2, 120-22
11. Joel Snyder has carefully explicated Wheeler's complaint concerning the inexactitude of photography. See Snyder, "Aesthetics and Documentation: Remarks Concerning Critical Approaches to the Photographs of Timothy H. O'Sullivan," in Perspectives on Photography: Essays in Honor of Beaumont Newhall, ed. Peter Walch and Thomas Barrow (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986), 125-150, at 144-46
12. George M. Wheeler et al., Progress Report upon Geographical and Geological Explorations and Surveys West of the One Hundredth Meridian in 1872 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1874), 11
13. For a wide-ranging discussion of the issues of condensation and legibility in graphic display, see Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Cheshire, Conn.: Graphics Press, 1983)
14. On the qualities and functions of hachures versus contour lines, see Edward S. Casey, Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 144-47
15. I am using iconic in the Peircean sense. See Charles Sanders Peirce, The Philosophy of Peirce: Selected Writings, ed. Justus Buchler (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1940), 104-7
16. and Joel Snyder, "Territorial Photography," in Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 175-201, at 193-94. A promotional function can explain these distortions more readily than a scientific or reportage function can
17. Wheeler to O'Sullivan, Nov. 20, 1873, BL2, 222-23
18. George M. Wheeler et al., Annual Report upon the Geographical Explorations and Surveys West of the One Hundredth Meridian. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1876), 79
19. Wheeler to Humphreys, Nov. 6, 1873, BL2, 192-93
20. See Daniel C. Haskell, The United States Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842, and Its Publications, 1844-1874 (New York: New York Public Library, 1942), 23
21. For a history of this conflict, see L. R. Bailey, The Long Walk: A History of the Navajo Wars, 1846-1868 (Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1964)
22. Frederick W. Loring, "A Council of War," Appleton's Journal of Literature, Science and Art, Aug. 12, 1871, 182-83, at 182