1Fissure Vent at Steamboat Springs, Nevada, 1867
(Metropolitan Museum of Art)
This is an image of a fumarole, an opening in the crust of the earth that emits steam and volcanic gas, and it was made in 1867, in what was then the three-year-old state of Nevada, where the photographer set up his camera in a small, dry basin that is still today an area of significant geothermal activity. It is an in-between place, or feels like it: the Sierra Nevada mountains rise a few miles to the east, and the hills of the Virginia Range are to the west and even closer. At the very moment this photographic plate was exposed, the Virginia Range was being hollowed out for copper: regiments of men were digging through cave-ins and explosions, mining bigger and bigger cavities in the earth. None of this activity is captured by Fissure Vent, as the image is titled, nor is the molten rock that lies a thousand feet down, propelling steam up through crystalline cracks in the earth so fast as to cause the ground itself to rumble, an enginelike sound that, in the 1860s, earned the fumarole a nickname, Steamboat Springs.
Also not pictured is the nearby resort, built to exploit the adjacent hot springs. The springs were well-known to the Northern Paiute and Washoe peoples, who, after pointing them out to settlers, were themselves now being monitored by white militias and by U.S. soldiers at nearby forts. If this picture seems to have less to say about resorts and leisure and more about violence, if it resembles a rift or a scar or even a wound, note that the man who made it had recently arrived in Nevada as an employee of the U.S. Army. Note, too, that from 1861 through 1865 he had served as a photographer alongside the Union army, following the troops as they fought against the Confederate soldiers in the eastern United States. For the army he photographed maps and views of potential battle sites, and for publishers he photographed soldiers and battlefields and dead bodies. His pictures alternately depict the mundane and the horrifying, and together they make up what are today the most widely known images of the war. The photographer’s name was Timothy O’Sullivan.
To make this image of the fumarole, O’Sullivan used a camera that looked less like what we think of today as a picture-making device—a camera or a smartphone—and more like a large, lightproof wooden box, the size of an old TV set or a mini fridge, the front punctuated by a heavy brass lens, the polished glass protruding like a cross between a nose and an eye. Inside the box, in the darkness of its lightproof interior, a rectangular plate of glass waited like an empty movie screen for the light that would be focused through the lens—in this instance, light reflecting off a jagged valley floor in the winter of 1867.
If you’ve ever looked up at the beam of light from a movie projector or noticed a sunrise flashing on a bedroom wall, you know that light is alive, or appears to be. In order to capture the light of that very day and then to hold on to it—to construct, in other words, an image using that 1867 Nevada winter light—O’Sullivan covered his photographic plates with collodion, a nearly clear, syrupy liquid that was then further treated with a solution of light-sensitive silver nitrate. The method was (and still is) referred to as the wet plate collodion process. Collodion was employed in various other capacities around the time of the Civil War. It was used as a liquid bandage—when smeared on broken skin and allowed to dry, it patched up cuts and lacerations. The essential ingredient in collodion is nitrocellulose, also known as guncotton, which was made by treating cotton with sulfuric and nitric acids. Guncotton was an explosive, used to power some of the artillery shells that cratered the battlefields O’Sullivan photographed. My point being that the same materials that offer us a view of this fumarole in the aftermath of what is referred to today as the Civil War were key ingredients in that very war: the cotton picked by enslaved people on Southern plantations and the silver extracted from mines blasted out of Indigenous lands. When O’Sullivan removed the lens cover, the ingredients were, by a timed-out entrance of light, exposed.
To the West
Timothy O’Sullivan is America’s most famous war photographer, a man whose photographs you most likely know even if you don’t know his name. In 1867, when he made this image of the fumarole, O’Sullivan had just arrived in the Great Basin to begin documenting a journey across an expanse of land that would, when he finished almost eight years later, total millions of acres. It was an arduous campaign, sending him through landscapes that are today part of Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Idaho, and California, regions that are more broadly described as the Great Basin, the Colorado Plateau, and the southern Great Plains. He did this work on behalf of two different commanders, one a civilian, one an army officer, but on both occasions under contract with the U.S. Army, for which he had worked over the course of the Civil War, making plates very much like this one—sharp, practical, and wondrously and often preternaturally straightforward.
Or perhaps not so straightforward. If you are like me and your eyes focus slowly on the picture of the fissure at Steamboat Creek, it might take you a moment to see the half-hidden man standing behind the steam. That figure might be O’Sullivan, though more likely it is a packer that the survey assigned to help him load and unload the plates and chemicals and cameras from a mule or the back of a wagon. But these are the sorts of uncertainties you encounter when you follow O’Sullivan. How you see that mist-shrouded figure, or whether you see him at all, might say something about you or about how you see the West. For my own part, I see it as a self-portrait by O’Sullivan, or a portrait of a photographer who is not yet done photographing the war.
When O’Sullivan began his camera work in 1861, primarily while following the Army of the Potomac, he was at the outset of four years of making glass plate negatives in and around battlefields. He first photographed coastal South Carolina, immediately following the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, the opening shots of the war. He then made hundreds and hundreds of wet plate negatives, all across the corpse-strewn woods and pastures of Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, where cities and towns are connected and separated by the various smaller ranges that make up the Appalachian Mountains. Toward the end of the conflict, he photographed the ravaged environs of Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederate States of America, vistas of battlements and bombproof shelters, men living, after months of siege, like rats burrowed into a field. After working for Mathew Brady, the renowned New York–based photographer, O’Sullivan assisted Alexander Gardner, who had photographed Lincoln at the White House. In the spring of 1865, for one of his very last wartime pictures, he photographed the site where General Robert E. Lee surrendered his army, at the Appomattox Court House in Virginia’s Piedmont plateau. Shortly thereafter, he worked with Gardner to photograph the execution of Lincoln’s assassins and—it is rumored, though the photo has never been found—of Lincoln’s corpse.
An image he took approximately halfway through the war is perhaps his most famous, still in wide circulation today in textbooks and magazines and on websites, then as now almost always presented as a symbol of the war. It shows the Gettysburg battlefield littered with corpses, the dead seeming maybe still alive, the living looking on at a distance through a palpable mist, appearing to be, like the mist-shrouded man in O’Sullivan’s picture of the Nevada fumarole, apparitions. This picture is titled A Harvest of Death.
In considering O’Sullivan’s pictures, it’s important to keep in mind the role of photographs in the 1860s. They were praised for a kind of accuracy that eluded artists, extolled alternatively as technical achievements and acts of magic. Newspapers would eventually print photos through various photomechanical processes, but at first they printed etchings based on photographs brought back from a scene. Meanwhile, photographic prints were popular consumer items in the 1860s, collected in various forms and very often viewed at home, as entertainment. As a war photographer, O’Sullivan was making pictures at the dawn of what would become a photo-saturated and then photo-obsessed culture, proof of which is in your camera, which is also armed with a phone and a personal computer and a tracking device of sorts, surveying you. For several months after he made his last war photos at Appomattox, O’Sullivan’s pictures were printed by the thousands as cartes de visite or as stereographs, the latter viewed in handheld stereo viewers—precursors to the virtual reality headsets of today—often sold door-to-door by college students working for their tuition. “The Stereoscope is now seen in every street, it is found in almost every drawing-room; philosophers talk learnedly upon it, ladies are delighted with its magic representation, and children play with it,” The Art Journal reported in 1856.
To make these prints, glass photographic plates were laid down on paper treated first with albumen, a paste made primarily from egg whites, next with silver nitrate; light, typically through a photography studio’s glass ceiling, slowly burned an image into the paper, which was then treated with a solution of sodium thiosulfate, to fix the exposure, and sometimes toned with selenium or gold. Undoubtedly, prints made from O’Sullivan’s glass plate images were for sale wherever he could sell them, depending on who owned the plates he made and depending on his rights to print them, if he held any of those rights. Often he was paid by the print, a few cents for each, or sometimes not paid at all.
After Appomattox, O’Sullivan bounced between addresses until the spring of 1867, when he packed up some box cameras, a stereo camera, several lenses, and various supplies and headed west, to the territories the United States had only just begun to incorporate prior to the Civil War. In 1867 the land west of the Mississippi was, for the most part, a national project that the internecine military conflict had put on hold, and the war had been fought in part over the West and its future, the brutal details of how slavery and land inhabited by Native Americans would be handled as the country expanded. After years of surveying potential routes, workers had begun building the transcontinental railroad in 1862, but construction slowed when the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter. Now, O’Sullivan’s first job in the West was to make the photographs that would accompany the publication of a great scientific survey of the Great Basin. It would also describe the region in terms of business opportunities, highlighting potential coal deposits and the profitability of silver mining in the very territories that two state-sponsored corporations—the Central Pacific Railroad and the Union Pacific Railroad—were only a few months away from linking by rail.
Exciting serenity
Today you can see a print of O’Sullivan’s picture of the fumarole at Steamboat Springs, Nevada, in the Library of Congress or online on their website. You can see a print at the National Archives, as well as in the collections of various museums. The Metropolitan Museum of Art attributes what it calls “the picture’s mystery” to how little we know of the plate’s provenance. “For some of the most mesmerizing photographs made for ostensibly documentary purposes, we have only clues to elucidate the original intention,” the museum writes. The catalog then goes on to hypothesize. Hypothesizing, I have noticed over the years, is an almost inevitable result when you are considering O’Sullivan or his photography or any combination of the two:
Surely the shadowy figure is on the edge of an abyss, but whether he is to be swallowed up by it or has just risen from it is unclear. Maybe the point is his very ambiguity in the infernal, Dantean space. Or perhaps he is the anchor in a depiction of an amorphous geological event—the familiar entity by which all things are measured, including the density of vapor and the passage of time.
Like the Metropolitan Museum, I have some ideas about the thinking that went into making this photo, many of them biased by the fact that I have spent my life living as a freelance, as did O’Sullivan, a cameraman whose work was almost always at the bidding of his various survey bosses—hired and fired at will, working or not working at the pleasure of a scientist or a commanding military officer or publishers back in New York. I have other ideas, too, all more biased, I suppose, by other aspects of my personal history as well as by years of writing about the American landscape in the West and the East: driving through it, studying it, working things out for the sake of assignments or survival in storms or tired cars, or some combination of these things—always trying to understand what I can see and, more important, what I cannot.
My first guess is that if O’Sullivan was working to make a point while making the picture at Steamboat Springs, that point probably had less to do with the Dantean space and more to do with trying to earn a living, which can be Dantean in itself. He had to sell the picture, either to his boss at the time (a geologist who thought of himself as an artist and was thus interested in the Dantean) or to the photography publishers back in New York, who were generally interested in what could be called spectacle, something this fumarole image broadcasts in abundance. Ideally, he would sell it to both—if, that is, he could manage to secure the right to use it himself, to print again from the plate, which, thanks to the process, allowed infinite reprinting.
I’m not saying that highlighting the infernal wasn’t part of his thinking; it would have been had his bosses wanted it to be, as they very well might have. I’m arguing that selling photos any way he could was part of O’Sullivan’s training, that marketing his pictures was part of his genetic makeup as a photographer in post–Civil War America, trying to make a living as a photographer in a world full of photographers taking pictures of many of the very same places and things.
Yet I am far from alone in noticing that, in comparison with the small but renowned group of a dozen or so photographers working at the same time and selling to the same markets and the same government survey directors, O’Sullivan’s work is different. Modern critics and photographers alike have described something striking, something that is being said but is just beneath the surface.
“His photographs are singular when compared with the work of other western photographers of the period,” writes Joel Snyder, a photographer and critic. For Snyder, O’Sullivan’s photos are at odds with the work of such late nineteenth-century contemporaries as Carleton Watkins, whose mammoth plate photos of Yosemite celebrate what might be called the romantic beauty of a valley that he depicted as empty and primeval. Not coincidentally, Watkins’s photos prompted Congress to declare Yosemite the first national park. O’Sullivan’s photos, by contrast, don’t appear to romanticize the western landscape; no one opened a national park after he made a picture, though I have a theory about what happened after he made his pictures, a theory that I hope to explain. As with a park, my theory has to do with cordoning off land. Often O’Sullivan’s photos seem to do the opposite of romanticizing the landscape. “They repeatedly deny what Watkins’s photographs characteristically confirm, namely, the possibility of comfortable habitation, of an agreeable relation of humans to the natural landscape,” Snyder writes. “They portray a bleak, inhospitable land, a godforsaken, anesthetizing landscape.”
Robert Adams, an East Coast–born photographer who has photographed extensively in the western United States over the past few decades, has cited his admiration for O’Sullivan’s photos above all the other post–Civil War survey photographers. He has equated them with poetry, concerned primarily with what’s not there. “O’Sullivan’s goal,” Adams wrote, “seems to have been, as Cézanne phrased it, ‘exciting serenity.’”
But over and over, if you are looking for O’Sullivan’s intentions, you realize that it’s all guesswork—his intentions concerning his photographs, his intentions concerning anything. “The fact is,” wrote Colin Westerbeck in Artforum in 1982, “that no amount of scholarly legwork is ever going to track down the origins of O’Sullivan’s pictures.”
The length of exposure
The only things that can be said with certainty about O’Sullivan’s photographs concern how they were made. The wet plate process was cumbersome, especially in the field, a term that in this case doesn’t accurately represent a cold, windswept desert valley where steam billows from the bowels of the earth. After lugging his camera to the fissure, after choices about a lens and the opening therein (the so-called aperture), after carefully framing the image to his liking—in this case, adjusting the wooden legs of his tripod and tilting the lens a few degrees to the left in order to align the steam vent and the human figure behind it—O’Sullivan then prepared his plate, slowly pouring collodion on an eight-by-ten-inch rectangle of glass. Pouring collodion in this way is known as “flowing the plate,” and when done expertly, the procedure resembles a waiter carefully balancing a drink on a very small tray or, more precisely, using one hand to slowly pour a drink onto the tray that he holds with the other, the tray in this case being a pane of glass. The first time I saw someone do it, it looked like a carefully executed mistake: a faint layer of collodion coated the glass, a perfect sheen, the excess slowly poured back into a jar.
After flowing the plate, O’Sullivan would have hurried to a small portable darkroom, racing to complete the next step in the process before the collodion dried or evaporated. The darkroom was a stand-up tent or a tent-covered desk, a workroom-for-one perched on a tripod. Inside, he carefully poured a solution of silver nitrate onto the collodion-covered plate, sealing it up in a slim, lighttight wooden holder, something like a boxed-up picture frame. He would have put that holder inside the camera, fixing it opposite the lens. Carefully, while the plate was still inside the camera, he would have removed the metal front of the wet plate holder. Now the prepared plate was poised for exposure—in the case of Steamboat Springs, waiting to be exposed by the light of this geothermal hot spot that straddles the towering Sierras and the undulating expanse of arid peaks and alkaline valleys that comprise what geologists call the Basin and Range.
Finally, with everything in place, O’Sullivan removed the cap covering the camera’s lens—and waited as the film was exposed. He waited anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes, depending on how cloudy a day it was or how bright, depending on how much sky was in the scene as he framed it, how dark the nearby rocks or shady a canyon. He might have used a stopwatch, or he might have simply estimated, given his experience as a veteran of thousands of plates made in the field during the preceding military conflict that was, in 1867, not yet called the Civil War. He began photographing battle scenes when he was only twenty, his pictures sent back to galleries for hurried viewings or reproduced as etchings in newspapers and magazines eager to exploit images of the war. Every detail was considered; it had to be for a wet plate photographer, and O’Sullivan used angles and light, time and chemistry to make photographs that were not like what other photographers made, pictures that seemed to be seeing things in the western landscape, things other people didn’t see.
In some ways, determining the length of exposure is a cold calculation, a mere measure of the amount of light available. Then again, if you think of the world as a place vibrating with varying degrees of intensity, you can imagine the time he waited as dependent on the intensity of the world at that moment and in that place. Either way, we know that in a matter of minutes in the winter of 1867, the light that reflected off this rumbling volcanic fissure entered the camera; that the light then touched the silver solution coating the wet glass plate; that the light reacted with the silver; and, when the plate was exposed just long enough, that the photographer covered the lens again, to cut off the light and seal up the wooden box in hopes of avoiding an overexposure, in which case the light would strip away details or even wash the scene away.
At this point, with the plate exposed, O’Sullivan had to hurry, or hurry yet again, the tortured technical logistics allowing only a few minutes to work. Thus, he quickly slid the rectangular metal sheet back into the glass plate holder, still attached to the back of the camera. Once the plateholder was resealed, he removed it from the back of the camera and went quickly back to his standing darkroom. In this instance, the darkroom was set up alongside the mule-drawn wagon that he used to carry supplies, a converted U.S. Army field ambulance, the same kind that, during the war, treated casualties on the battlefield. His wagon is seen in the photograph on the facing page, made from another vantage on the same outing, a behind-the-scenes look that in its flatness emphasizes the work he did to make Fissure Vent at Steamboat Springs.
Steamboat Springs, Washoe, Nevada, 1867 (left to right: portable standing darkroom, mules and men, mule-drawn ambulance turned darkroom)
At last, the camera operator (as he would have been referred to in 1867) developed his photograph, alone in the dark inside that standing tent. A small amount of light came in through a tiny colored lens in the canvas tent’s high corner, dimly illuminating his hands and the trays of liquids and the plate—allowing him, most importantly, to see the solution on that plate change from a rectangle of cloudy nothing into a warm, alive-seeming impression of a fumarole. In those seconds, the picture would have appeared lit like clouds by a moon, developing slowly, as if out of nowhere: clear water that suddenly rippled with gray streaks and white streams, a plate-size dream appearing and sharpening. The first time you see a wet collodion plate develop, and very often thereafter, the process seems like magic, or like ghosts materializing—what in fact seems to be happening not only in many of the photographs O’Sullivan made during the Civil War but also in this picture of a fumarole.
The image would continue to develop, and even develop away, if it weren’t (to use the photographer’s technical phrase) fixed. Fixing the plate halts the chemical process. Most likely, O’Sullivan fixed this plate with potassium cyanide, cyanide being a solution at the time also employed in gold mining, assassinations, and suicides. After the cyanide, and before painting the plate with clear varnish, he washed it with water to completely shut down any remaining chemical reactions. Water was also transported in O’Sullivan’s ambulance, though precisely where he collected the water necessary to make this image can’t be said for certain. Very little about this photograph can be said for certain. Very little can be said about O’Sullivan, for that matter, even though he made hundreds of the most enduring visual touchstones in the history of the United States of America, by now long fixed in the national memory book.
Perhaps water was carried to the site in jugs through the often water-scarce conditions of the Great Basin, or perhaps drawn from the nearby stream, called Steamboat Creek. Steamboat Creek drains Washoe Lake and, like nearby Lake Tahoe, its waters flow into the Truckee River, ending up at Pyramid Lake, from where it goes nowhere. The Truckee goes nowhere; lakes in this part of the country are within what hydrologists refer to as an endothermic drainage system, also known as a closed or terminal basin. In a terminal basin, water doesn’t ever get to the sea. It remains in the lakes, where it seeps deep into the ground or evaporates, or just seems to disappear.
Copyright © 2024 by Robert Sullivan