Historic Spanish Record of the Conquest. South Side of Inscription Rock, New Mexico, No. 3

Timothy O’Sullivan began his career as an apprentice in Mathew Brady’s New York studio, and then worked for the duration of the Civil War with Alexander Gardner’s corps of photographers. In the following decade, O’Sullivan participated in a number of governmental surveys of the American West, charting vast, rugged expanses of land in search of natural resources and areas for future settlement.
O’Sullivan often includes details of the surveyors’ trade in his photographs, such as his wagon, tent, or the ruler placed here under the 17th century graffiti of Spanish explorers. In this way, his images link the primordial to the present, the natural to the civilized, the explored to the explorers. While many a surveyor has included a measuring stick in their pictures, O’Sullivan’s ruler is so blatant an intrusion that it asks to read not only as a provider of scale, but a metaphor for his century’s scientific positivism.