Double Exposure
Resurveying the West with Timothy O'Sullivan, America's Most Mysterious War Photographer
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- ¥1,500
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- ¥1,500
発行者による作品情報
One of The New Yorker's best books of the year so far | A Kirkus Reviews Best Nature Book of 2024
“Singular . . . Virtuosic . . . Double Exposure is the best book I’ve read about America . . . in many, many years.” —Corey Seymour, Vogue (a best book of 2024)
“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.
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Journalist Sullivan (Rats) blends memoir, biography, and history for a meditative if diffuse portrait of celebrated 19th-century photographer Timothy O'Sullivan (1840–1882) and the changing landscape of the American West. Entranced by the pictures of landscapes, towns, and mines that O'Sullivan captured on surveying expeditions in the 1870s, Sullivan set out to "resurvey surveys" by visiting the sites of some of his most well-known shots. Though the paucity of available biographical information makes O'Sullivan an enigmatic subject, Sullivan fills in the gaps with detailed accounts of the expeditions, describing, among other episodes, boats sinking in Colorado River and a tyrannical expedition leader who has a Native American boy tortured after a mule goes missing. Sullivan's own presence in the narrative adds dark, nervous tension, whether he's "feel useless and down" after spilling coffee on himself at a motel or weathering a terrifying nerve injury, and his photographic analyses are rich and evocative ("The accuracy in O'Sullivan's is in the way it illustrates how the dune... envelops a person as if they were afloat in a creamy white sea," he writes about an image of Nevada's Sand Mountain). Unfortunately, Sullivan's attempts to reckon with America's legacy of slavery, dispossession, and environmental destruction feel less focused. Though there's plenty to admire, this doesn't quite stick the landing. Photos.
