DOUBLE EXPOSURE

A fascinating account of a crucial photographer of westward expansion and a reckoning with the colonization of the American West.

Timothy O’Sullivan (1840-1882) was a legendary photographer of the Civil War who also traveled across the West on several surveys as the expedition photographer. The resulting images, many included in this book, are haunting. They portray stark landscapes, mining, and the colonization of the West at a time when violence and desperation were high: “The West—where citizenship was disputed, where sovereignty was devalued or ignored—would become a battle site, and not just with guns but with miners and dams, with vigilantes and nativists, with ranches and land grabs made by Congress-backed corporations.” O’Sullivan’s photos document a time when Indigenous land rights were trampled, treaties ignored, and white settlers scrambled to survive. It’s a fascinating and essential era in American history, a period that historian Richard Maxwell Brown has called the “Western Civil War of Incorporation.” Sullivan chronicles his visits to several key locations in O’Sullivan’s photos, exploring the violence wrought on the landscape and people. These sites include Death Valley, where O’Sullivan developed photos in a mule-drawn ambulance he converted into a dark room; Panama, where he photographed the dense jungle before the construction of the canal; and various mines, where he took the first known underground photo, risking the flare of magnesium to do so. Sullivan’s research is meticulous and his storytelling engaging. O’Sullivan is an intriguing figure, but what is most fascinating is the author’s examination of westward expansion as a kind of war of both arms and ideas. The photos, writes the author, allow us “to reframe not just the American landscape but the stories we tell ourselves about America, the things we believe and feel.”

A riveting, highly valuable reexamination of the West, compelling to anyone interested in its history.