Lower Mesa, Near Young Springs, Arizona Territory
Medium
Albumen silver print from glass negative
Classification
Photographs
Department
Photographs
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest and The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1986
Accession Number
1986.1054.33
Art Historical Context
**Lower Mesa, Near Young Springs, Arizona Territory**1871) captures the stark beauty of the American Southwest through the lens of Timothy H. O'Sullivan, pioneering photographer. Taken during the U.S.'s Wheeler Survey—a government expedition mapping the uncharted West for settlement and resource evaluation—this albumen silver print depicts a dramatic lower mesa landscape near Young Springs in the Arizona Territory. O'Sullivan, famed for his work with Mathew Brady during the Civil War, brought his keen eye for topography to these surveys, producing images that doubled as scientific records and ...
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...