Timothy H. O’Sullivan was an American photographer best known for his images of the American Civil War and landscapes of the West. The austerely sculptural images he captured of river canyons in Colorado are among his most acclaimed works. “His landscapes are as precisely and as economically composed as a good masonry wall,” John Szarkowski once wrote of his photographs. “It is as though every square inch of the precious glass plate, carried so far at so great an effort, had to be justified completely.” Born in c. 1840 in Ireland, he grew up in New York, beginning his photography career as an apprentice to Mathew Brady. In 1861, O’Sullivan accompanied Brady to photograph images of the Civil War, where he established himself through capturing the carnage at the Battle of Gettysburg. In the decades that followed, the artist traveled on geological surveys sponsored by the US government, where he carried around the materials he needed to develop photos in a wagon and in his bags. He later photographed Apache scouts, Zuni pueblos, and the ruins of the cliff-dwelling culture of Canyon de Chelly. O’Sullivan died on January 14, 1882 in Staten Island, NY. Today, his photographs are held in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others.