Timothy H. O'Sullivan

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(b ?Ireland, 1840; d Staten Island, NY, 14 Jan 1882). American photographer. He was employed in the studio of Mathew Brady in Washington, DC, when the Civil War (1861-5) broke out. After photographing the early stages of the war in South Carolina, he left Brady's studio to work for ALEXANDER GARDNER, and almost one half of the photographs in Gardner's Photographic Sketchbook of the War (?New York, 1866/R1959) are by him. O'Sullivan's war photographs, like Gardner's, moved beyond the superficial documentation of battlefields and the mundane activities of armies, and he began to photograph the grim reality of war; he is particularly noted for his photographs of battlefield dead (e.g. Field where General Reynolds Fell, 1863; see Snyder, 1981, p. 17; see also PHOTOGRAPHY, fig. 14).

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O'Sullivan, Timothy H. (1840-82), American photographer. Possibly born in Ireland (though he claimed Staten Island, New York, as his birthplace), O'Sullivan was one of the major photographers of the Civil War (1861-5) and the American West. He began at a young age as an apprentice in the portrait studios of Mathew Brady. With Brady, and later Alexander Gardner, O'Sullivan photographed much of the Civil War including the battles of Antietam and Gettysburg. Following those grim years, he was an official photographer for several government expeditions mapping the still relatively unknown regions of the West. From 1867 to 1869, he accompanied Clarence King and his Geological Explorations of the Fortieth Parallel into the Great Basin. Later, 1871-4, he joined Lieutenant George Montague Wheeler, leader of the US Geographical Surveys West of the One Hundredth Meridian, on various journeys into the south-west. O'Sullivan's clear, often austere images constitute a curiously unromanticized record of the West, very different from, but no less important than, for example, the work of William Henry Jackson and Carleton Watkins. O'Sullivan died of tuberculosis aged 42.

— Tim Troy

Bibliography

• Snyder, J., American Frontiers: The Photographs of Timothy H. O'Sullivan, 1867-1874 (1981)