Sand Dunes, Carson Desert, Nevada
Artist
Timothy H. O'Sullivan
(American, born Ireland, 1840 - 1882)
Date1867
MediumAlbumen print
DimensionsImage and sheet: 7 7/8 × 10 5/8 inches (20 × 26.99 cm)
Mount: 18 × 24 1/16 inches (45.72 × 61.12 cm)
Mount: 18 × 24 1/16 inches (45.72 × 61.12 cm)
Credit LineGift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.
Object number2005.27.191
SignedOn mount recto, bottom center, in black type: "T.H. O'Sullivan, Photographer."
InscribedOn mount recto, bottom center, in black type: "U.S. / ENGINEER DEPARTMENT. / GEOLOGICAL EXPLORATION. / FORTIETH PARALLEL";
On mount recto, lower right, in black type: "No.";
On mount verso, lower right, in pencil: "Desert Sand Hills near Sink of Carson".
MarkingsOn mount recto, lower left corner, in pencil: "4";
On mount recto, lower right corner, in pencil: "2", " NOT MIT".
On View
Not on viewCollections
DescriptionImage of four mules pulling a covered wagon through rolling sand dunes; their path shows them making a U-turn near the center of the image and heading back out of the frame.Exhibition HistoryDeveloping Greatness: The Origins of American Photography, 1839-1885. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, June 9 – December 30, 2007, no. 458.
Timothy H. O’Sullivan: The King Survey Photographs. The Art Institute of Chicago, October 22, 2011 - January 15, 2012, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, April 7 - September 2, 2012, Brigham Young University Museum of Art, Provo, UT, January 23 - May 26, 2014, no. 22.
Timothy O’Sullivan made this photograph when he worked for the U.S. Geological Survey of the Fortieth Parallel, led by Clarence King. It is both a document of the region’s desert terrain and an elegantly self-referential image. O’Sullivan’s footprints in the foreground lead back and forth between his camera and his horse-drawn darkroom wagon in the distance. The resulting image suggests a fleeting human presence—O’Sullivan’s own—within a landscape that is itself unstable and shifting.
Rick Dingus, The Photographic Artifacts of Timothy O'Sullivan (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982); Joel Snyder, American Frontiers: The Photographs of Timothy O'Sullivan, 1867-1874 (New York: Aperture, 1981); Robin Earle Kelsey, Photography in the Field: Timothy O'Sullivan and the Wheeler Survey, 1871-1874 (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 2000).
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