The first time I was handed Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O'Sullivan, I distractedly started to look through the pages while talking to two contemporary southwestern landscape photographers who have themselves been enormously influenced by O'Sullivan's images, Edward Ranney and Michael P. Berman. Hooked by the photographs, I reluctantly put the book down, torn between the desire to keep looking and the horrifying possibility that I might drool on a new book that didn't belong to me. That, and the conversation we were having about art, the environment, and radicalizing the dissemination of books, forced me to choose where to focus my attention. The second time I was handed the book I knew I could take it home where I could direct my attention in a way that the imposing book deserved. I promised not to drool.



This beautifully designed book spans the photographs O'Sullivan made during two arduous campaigns in the Western United States during the late 1860s and 70s that covered territory that is now Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and California. The first was the Geologic and Geographic Survey of the Fortieth Parallel under the scientific direction of noted geologist Clarence King sponsored by the Department of War. The Survey of the Fortieth Parallel traversed an eight hundred mile long strip of mountainous and arid terrain then known as the "Great American Desert." The second was the Geographical and Geological Surveys West of the Hundredth Meridian under the military command of Lieutenant George M. Wheeler, paid for by the U. S. Congress.




In his poetically personal and elegant introduction Page Stegner sets the stage: "...the photographic record of the nineteenth-century West contains no images that are any more honest or realistic in temperament. They are not romantic, they do not chronicle the sublime, there is no soaring Wagner in the background. On the contrary, they strive for a sense of the experience of a given landscape, and they speak more to the character of place than to what is physically there."

As Ed Ranney says, "[O'Sullivan's images] provide a record of engagement." Just as O'Sullivan was emotionally engaged with the expansive landscapes he found in the West after photographing the cloying horrors he saw on the battlefields of the Civil War, so too the viewer engages with O'Sullivan's images of the West of 150 years ago, then more empty than today and viewed without the mythic layers that have added the patina of nostalgia we may feel for these deeply quiet places. I am struck most by those images that include the self-referential artifacts of the photographer's developing tent, horses and darkroom wagons, or the long shadows cast by the artist working with his camera and tripod to record what was in front of his lens. O'Sullivan not only recorded the land but also his journey and those of his companions as they set about mapping their travels and opening the frontier to other interests.

A scholarly book that would gracefully adorn any coffee table, the authors more than did their homework, after excellent essays, the book culminates with a detailed chronology of O'Sullivan, an extensive selected bibliography of primary and secondary sources, detailed notes, and no less than seven illustrated appendixes. —Mary Anne Redding