Cañon de Chelle. Walls of the Grand Cañon about 1200 Feet in Height.
Medium
Photography-Photoprint
Classification
Photography-Photoprint
Department
Smithsonian Collection
Museum
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Credit
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment
Accession Number
1994.91.134
Tags
Art Historical Context
Step into the dramatic vastness of the American Southwest with *Cañon de Chelle. Walls of the Grand Caon about 1200 in Height* (1873), a stunning photoprint by Timothy H. O'Sullivan.ured in Arizona's Canyon Chelly—sacred land with sheer rock formations soaring over 1,200 feet—a small expedition tent anchors the foreground emphasizing the sublime scale of nature against human. O'Sullivan, a master of19th-century photography, the era's wet-collodion to produce crisp, detailed images that rival paintings in their evocative power. This work emerged from the U.S. Army's Wheeler Expedition (1871–18...
About the Artist
Timothy H. O'Sullivan · 1840–present
Timothy H. O'Sullivan (c. 1840–1882) was a pioneering American photographer whose unflinching lens captured the raw devastation of the Civil War and the sublime vastness of the untamed West. Born in New York City—or possibly Ireland, with his family migrating soon after—his early life remains sparsely documented. As a teenager, he apprenticed under Mathew Brady at the famed daguerreotype studio on...