laststandonzombieisland

Much as once a week I like to take time off to cover warships (Wednesdays), on Sundays (when I feel like working), I like to cover military art and the painters, illustrators, sculptors, photographers and the like that produced them.

Combat Gallery Sunday : The Martial Art of Timothy H. O’Sullivan

Irish-born Timothy H. O’Sullivan came to the United States while still a toddler and, like many in the great Potato Famine diaspora, settled in the New York City area.

As a teen he found work with a man who had a daguerreotype studio in the great city by the name of Mathew B. Brady. While there, O’Sullivan was exposed to early and experimental ambrotype photography and later albumen print from glass negatives– including cheap cartes de visite studio portraits which Brady was a master of.

When the Civil War came, (according to some, there are skeptics) O’Sullivan, then 21, joined the Union Army as an officer in the U.S. Topographical Engineers and likely served with surveying teams where his knowledge of photography aided him. Eventually, he found himself as a civilian again working for Mr. Brady (who was going blind), along with no less than 20 other budding photographers which were in effect the first combat photojournalists.

Using a traveling darkroom, by July 1862 O’Sullivan was off to cover the war as a civilian again. He eventually found himself partnered up with Scotsman Alexander Gardner, who at one time had managed Brady’s Washington D.C. studio before the War and had worked with O’Sullivan as a Captain in the Topographical Engineers (and chief army photographer).

The two covered the Antietam Campaign and many of their images were misattributed to Brady himself.

The two covered Gettysburg, where they famously manipulated the setting of the Rebel Sharpshooter photograph, with O’Sullivan helping him drag the body to a more advantageous position of the Devil’s Den, complete with prop rifle.

While the photographer took liberties with Confederate dead, he also had a good eye for then exotic military equipment, ruins of historic battles, and the staffs of generals, NCO messes, and rank and file alike.

He was present at just about every major battle in Northern Virginia as well as the taking of several Rebel seacoast forts.

His former buddy Gardner ripped him off considerably, using many of O’Sullivan’s images from Antietam in his own Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War, but it was the Irishman who came out on top, being tapped to accompany several expeditions for the government to Panama, the American West, and elsewhere while Gardner’s book flopped.

Brady did not fare much better. Bankrupt after the war as the Government refused to actually buy any of his stack of more than 10,000 plates, he sold everything he owned and closed his New York City studio, dying penniless at Presbyterian Hospital and interred in a simple grave.

For O’Sullivan, though successful he did not get to enjoy a long life. In his 40s, his traveling days were over, having contracted TB. He settled in the Washington D.C. area, splitting his time as the official photographer for the U.S. Geological Survey and the Treasury Department. He died in 1882.

Over 1,300 of O’Sullivan’s works are in the Library of Congress and have been reproduced extensively across a myriad of formats.

Thank you for your work, sir.