American Frontiers

"One of the first photographers to cross the American frontier, Timothy H. O'Sullivan met the challenge of the West's grandeur and mystery by creating landscapes of compelling subtlety and original vision. From 1867 to 1874, as photographer to the King and Wheeler geological surveys, O'Sullivan traveled thousands of miles, from San Francisco to Colorado, from the Arizona Indian territory to Idaho's Snake River. He made more than one thousand photographs in the field, ranging from scenes of the deserts of Nevada and California, the heights of the Humboldt Mountains, and torrential waters of Shoshone Falls to pictures taken inside mines illuminated by magnesium flares. O'Sullivan's western photographs represent not only an explorer's first encounter with a startling new terrain, but also an artist's vision of the power of Nature, at once threatening and awesome ... American Frontiers includes more than 80 photographs, many of them published here for the first time. Other O'Sullivan negatives, never printed in the photographer's lifetime, are represented in prints made especially for this book at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. by the original albumen process. In Joel Snyder's insightful text reveals new research that sheds light on this little known but important figure and relates O'Sullivan's work to theories of esthetics and American culture of the nineteenth century"--Jacket flap.