O'Sullivan

Osher Galleries, 1st floor West, American Art Museum February 12, 2010 – May 9, 2010
[|Timothy H. O'Sullivan] (1840–1882) was a photographer for two of the most ambitious geographical surveys of the nineteenth century. He traversed the mountain and desert regions of the western United States under the command of Clarence King and Lt. George M. Wheeler for six seasons between 1867 and 1874. O'Sullivan developed a forthright and rigorous style in response to the landscapes of the American West, and returned to Washington, D.C. with hundreds of photographs that revealed an artist whose reach far surpassed the demands of practical documentation. He created a body of work that was without precedent in its visual and emotional complexity, while simultaneously meeting the needs of scientific investigation and western expansion. This exhibition—a collaboration between the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Library of Congress—offers a critical reevaluation of his images and the conditions under which they were made, as well as an examination of their continued importance in the photographic canon. Of all his colleagues, O'Sullivan has maintained the strongest influence on contemporary practice, and observations about his images by six contemporary landscape photographers—Thomas Joshua Cooper, Eric Paddock, Edward Ranney, Mark Ruwedel, Martin Stupich, and Terry Toedtemeier—contribute to the exhibition and catalogue. //Framing the West// is the first major exhibition devoted to this remarkable photographer in almost three decades and features more than 120 photographs and stereo cards by O'Sullivan, including a notable group of King Survey photographs from the Library of Congress that rarely have been on public display since 1876. Toby Jurovics, curator for photography, organized the exhibition.

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