A renowned, mysterious photographer of the American civil war

But just an outline of O’Sullivan’s life story survives. Born in Ireland in 1840, he emigrated to New Orleans with his family and learned his trade in New York from Mathew Brady, who got rich and famous making portraits of the rich and famous. With his bulky camera and a travelling laboratory fashioned from an army-ambulance wagon, O’Sullivan soldiered through the civil war with the Union army, shooting pictures for Brady and then Alexander Gardner, one of Brady’s associates. (Brady exhibited the photos in his gallery; etching reproductions appeared in magazines and newspapers.)

After the war, he took photographs and stereographs—twinned pictures that create a three-dimensional image when viewed with special goggles—of the American West and Panama. He died of tuberculosis in 1882, aged 42. He left behind no letters, and a picture long considered to be a self-portrait is now thought to be of another man.

The key to understanding his pictures, Mr Sullivan argues, is the inversion of expectations. In “A Harvest of Death” the author identifies the photographer’s “trademark opposites”. In the distance the living look like spectres; in the foreground the dead are alive with detail. Throughout the war, O’Sullivan was attracted to unlikely perspectives: he once photographed Ulysses S. Grant and his officers from a church steeple, letting the viewer look down as if he were a Confederate sharpshooter.

The photographs O’Sullivan later took in the West—of towering cliffs and sand dunes, Native Americans and silver mines—also have an off-kilter feel. Mr Sullivan suggests that they are composed in the same visual language as the civil-war pictures, and that they indeed constitute “dispatches from the new theatre of war”: America’s westward expansion. Yet there is little triumphalism in his images.

O’Sullivan “repeatedly rejected the best general view” of mineral-rich mountains and frontier boomtowns, Mr Sullivan writes, preferring the images to be interesting rather than grand but bland. Similarly, instead of depicting Native Americans as stoic survivors of defeated tribes, as Edward Curtis would in the 1890s, O’Sullivan shows them as living, working people.

Photography was not established as fine art until the mid-20th century, so it is safe to say that O’Sullivan would not have thought of himself as an artist. His pictures, however, clearly show that he saw like one.

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