About

A key figure in early photography, Timothy O’Sullivan was among the first to take the medium beyond the portrait studio and into the field, producing some of the most enduring images of the American Civil War and the Western frontier. O’Sullivan began his career in the 1850s, working in the Washington, D.C., studio of Mathew Brady. He later joined Alexander Gardner, who credited O’Sullivan with forty-four battlefield photographs in Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (1866), one of the earliest published collections of Civil War photography.

Following the war, O’Sullivan served as the official photographer for several major government survey expeditions. He worked on the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel (or “King Survey”) in 1867–69 and again in 1872, the Darien Expedition to the Isthmus of Panama in 1870, and the Geographical Surveys West of the 100th Meridian (or “Wheeler Survey”) in 1871 and 1873–74. His photographs from these expeditions combined scientific documentation with a striking aesthetic sensibility, shaping visual perceptions of the American West.

Appointed chief photographer for the United States Treasury in 1880, O’Sullivan’s career was cut short when he died of tuberculosis later that year at the age of forty-one. His work remains foundational in the history of photography, influencing generations of photographers and shaping the visual legacy of 19th-century America.