Double Exposure: Resurveying the West with Timothy O'Sullivan, America's Most Mysterious War Photographer

by Robert Sullivan

Overview

“Singular . . . Virtuosic . . . Double Exposure is the best book I’ve read about America . . . in many, many years.” —Corey Seymour, Vogue

“Extraordinary . . . A transformative experience for the reader.” —Lucy Sante

“A large-hearted, wide-angled book . . . I couldn't put it down.” —Ian Frazier

A personal exploration of the American West and the work of one of America’s greatest photographers.

Timothy O’Sullivan is America’s most famous war photographer. You know his work even if you don’t know his name: A Harvest of Death, taken at Gettysburg, is an icon of the Civil War. He was also among the first photographers to elevate what was then a trade to the status of fine art. The images of the American West he made after the war, while traveling with the surveys led by Clarence King and George Wheeler, display a prescient awareness of what photography would become; years later, Ansel Adams would declare his work “surrealistic and disturbing.”

At the same time, we know very little about O’Sullivan himself. Nor do we know—really know—much more about the landscapes he captured. Robert Sullivan’s Double Exposure sets off in pursuit of these two enigmas. This book documents the author’s own road trip across the West in search of the places, many long forgotten or paved over, that O’Sullivan pictured. It also stages a reckoning with how the changes wrought on the land were already under way in the 1860s and ’70s, and how these changes were a continuation of the Civil War by other means. Sullivan, known for his probing investigations of place in the pages of The New Yorker and books like Rats and My American Revolution, has produced a work that, like O’Sullivan’s magisterial photos of geysers and hot springs, exposes a fissure in the American landscape itself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374151164
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/23/2024
Pages:	448
Sales rank:	149,882
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Robert Sullivan is the author of numerous books, including Rats, The Meadowlands, A Whale Hunt, and My American Revolution. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vogue, and New York, and he is a contributing editor at A Public Space. He was born in New York City, worked for many years in Portland, Oregon, and now lives in Philadelphia. He is the recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Editorial Reviews

★ 2024-01-30
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.

Kirkus Reviews

"Singular . . . The wonder of this book [. . .] is embedded in its DNA: It’s a survey, in the most glorious of definitions—a digressive, discursive, road-tripping wunderkammer between covers exploring our warring notions of the American West . . . Virtuosic . . . Double Exposure is the best book I’ve read about America [. . .] in many, many years." —Corey Seymour, Vogue

"Retracing O’Sullivan’s itinerary more than a century later for this study, Sullivan deftly takes up such themes as the political power of both photography and geology, the United States’ tortured racial hierarchies, the exploitation of natural resources—including land, gold, and silver—and the dispossession of Indigenous communities." —The New Yorker

"Sullivan, who attempted to retrace the photographer’s steps, evokes both these landscapes and the photographer’s approach in capturing their lonely essence. The author’s painstaking account of the warring personalities and insider baseball of the expeditions, rife with politics, occasional violence and outright corruption, shows what was at stake—control of a vast, rich and ripe-for-exploitation region." —Mary Ann Gwinn, Los Angeles Times

“A fascinating account of a crucial photographer of westward expansion and a reckoning with the colonization of the American West . . . 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 . . . A riveting, highly valuable reexamination.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"A compelling, haunted work of living history." —Booklist (starred review)

"A large-hearted, wide-angled book, gutsy in the extreme, that cinches the reader tight to some of the most powerful landscapes in America. Robert Sullivan follows the nineteenth-century footsteps of photographer Timothy O'Sullivan, reports with artistry and passion on what they both saw, and makes you love the country in its darkness as well as its light. The double story—Sullivan's and O'Sullivan's—and the pinpoint details drew me in so I couldn't put it down." —Ian Frazier, author of Cranial Fracking and On the Rez

"An astonishment, a terror, a revelation, of what can and cannot be seen. Double Exposure is a survey and a memoir—an investigation—of spectacle frozen in time, bleeding across a dangerous American land. 'Light is alive,' writes Sullivan, and so, too, are these brilliant pages; they shimmer with vision. Sullivan's masterpiece should change the way we see past and present, this country and our many troubled selves." —Jeff Sharlet, bestselling author of The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

"Robert Sullivan's extraordinary book wears many hats: it is a biography of a phantom; an important slice of photographic history; a profound meditation on the American landscape; a reckoning with the legacies of slavery, the Civil War, and the war against the indigenous population; and a deep personal journey for the author on top of that. It is just as transformative an experience for the reader." —Lucy Sante, author of Low Life and I Heard Her Call My Name

From the Publisher