Module 3: Photography as Knowledge

Photography and Ethnography

***relationship of power embedded in photography*** -anthropological gaze born in 19th century with European colonialism -photography was used as evidence with eurocentric gaze expressed (orientalism) underscoring cultural stereotypes -projection of European imaginary and exoticism -imbues control by capturing -photography was also used during its first decade to describe, compare, and rank "racial" types (notion of race was renewed in late 18th and early 19th centuries when used to describe innate qualities of nations and ethnicities, sometimes with the aim to arouse nationalistic feeling); with rapid colonization of non-Western world, human diversity was increasingly discussed and classified - The application of photography to human beings often present difficult issues. In 1869 Jones H. Lamprey, a member of both theEthnographic Society of London and the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), attempted to standardize the photography of indigenous peoples with what came to be known as the "Lamprey Grid." - It consisted of a large black panel with white strings stretched vertically and horizontally across its surface to form a grid of two-inch squares. Nude aboriginal subjects were to be photographed standing before the grid in frontal and profile views. - The two-inch squares would thus provide the means to make anthropometric studies of the subjects. -Thomas Henry Huxley, then President of the ESL, advocated a similar project in 1869. Heargued for front and profile views of nude native subjects posed with measuring sticks. Both the subject and the measuring stick would appear in the same plane of the photograph, thus enabling anthropometric assessment. -Apart from a few isolated case studies, Lamprey and Huxley's methods ultimately proved impractical, primarily because they required subjects from cultures willing to submit to these intrusive practices. - When European photography is used to record the people and practices of exotic 'other' cultures, it does so through cultural filters that tend to stabilize meaning through stereotypes, simplified (and often inaccurate) assumptions about them. - In his groundbreaking 1978 text Orientalism, the late cultural critic and theorist Edward Saïd argued that a dominant European political ideology created the notion of the Orient in order to subjugate and control it. -Saïd explained that the concept embodied ... distinctions between "East" (the Orient) and "West" (the Occident) precisely so the "West" could control and authorize views of the "East." -For Saïd, this nexus of power and knowledge enabled the "West" to generalize and misrepresent North Africa, the Middle East and Asia. -Though his text has itself received considerable criticism, the book nevertheless remains a pioneering intervention. Saïd continues to influence many disciplines of cultural study, including the history of art. - As art historian Linda Nochlin argued in her widely read essay, "The Imaginary Orient," from 1983, the task of critical art history is to assess the power structures behind any work of art or artist. - Following Nochlin's lead, art historians have questioned underlying power dynamics at play in the artistic representations of the "Orient," many of them from the nineteenth century. In doing so, these scholars challenged not only the ways that the "West" represented the "East," but they also complicate the long held misconception of a unidirectional westward influence. - Against the backdrop of painted representations of the Orient, the invention of photography in 1839 did little to contribute to a greater authenticity of representations of the "Orient" by artists,Western military officials, technocrats, and travelers. Instead, photographs were frequently staged and embellished to appeal to the Western imagination. - In this example, the studio photograph situates sitters in poses with handheld props against elaborate backdrops to create a fictitious world of the photographer's making. In keeping with the exoticism of paintings such as Ingres'Grande Odalisque with Slave on the right. -One also must consider the creation of an "Orient" as a result of imperialism, industrial capitalism, mass consumption, tourism, and settler colonialism in the nineteenth-century. -We should not then be surprised to see photography by Westerners like Felice Beato used in the service of the colonial occupation of India by the British, as seen in these images. -The Indian Rebellion of 1857 was a major, but ultimately unsuccessful, uprising in India in 1857-58 against the rule of the British East India Company, which functioned as a sovereign power on behalf of the British Crown. -Shortly after the British violently suppressed the Revolt of 1857,Beato docked in Calcutta. It had been only a few months since the violence had died down, and as Beatotravelled from Bengal to Delhi, he found a number of subjects that caught his eye. -Accompanied by a full caravan of Indian workers helping him setup the camera and travel comfortably, Beato travelled through the north of the country in search of sites to photograph. It is believed, though not established , that he was the first person to photograph corpses. In Sikandar Baghin Lucknow, he had bodies of slain Indian rebels dug up to define his pictures better. Another of his images from Delhi shows an entire road strewn with disembodied skulls. - These images of the aftermath of the Rebellion served to underscore the power of the British, and the success of their suppression of this mutiny. -Moving further East, we see here the work of Edinburgh-bornJohn Thomson (1837-1921) set off for Asia in 1862 and, over the next 10 years, chronicled life - from royalty to street vendors - in a number of Asian countries, including Siam, Cambodia and Vietnam. -But it was his photographs from four years spent in China that form one of the most extensive records of the region taken in the19th century. - Thomson's photographs function at times as portraits, but also as a travelogue, and in some ways an ethnographic documentation of life in China. -Thomson eventually settled in Hong Kong in 1868. For the next four years, he travelled around China photographing various peoples and cultures from Hong Kong and Canton, Peking, Shanghai, Formosa As well as venturing deep into central China. His subjects ranged from urban street beggars and peasants in rural settings to mandarins in imperial palaces. - He provided photographs and vivid written accounts of the use of opium in China, which ironically had gained currency largely due to the efforts of the colonizers from the West,who encouraged the opium trade. Thomson's writing never really mentions this fact, however. -On his return to the UK, Thomson photographed 'street types' in a photographic survey of London's poor, thus rendering the impoverished and working class of his home country in something like the way he had exoticized the people he saw in China. - Understanding how people in other cultures came to take up the use of photography is an interesting proposition. -Liang Shitai established his first photography studio in Hong Kongin the early 1870s. By 1876, he had moved his studio to Shanghai, possibly due to increased competition in HongKong from other photographers. - he was one of the foremost portrait photographers active in late Qing Dynasty China. -His portraits show a variety of compositional and stylistic techniques and show a clear link to the canon of Imperial portraiture. -He is well known for his portraits of Zaifeng, PrinceChun, and his father Yixuan, Prince Chun, taken over a period of two decades. - Of particular note to scholars isLiang Shitai's 1888 portrait of the elder Prince, taken near the end of the his life, in which the artist uses the elements of elite literati portraiture to cast the sitter in the familiar role of scholar at leisure augmented with auspicious symbols of longevity which function more as emblems or attributes than as personal possessions. - Liang Shitai was also noted for his application of calligraphic additions to his photographs, as we see in the image on the right here, which disrupt the perspective offered by the photograph, emphasizing the flat surface of the picture. -Compare for a moment this image of a Cantonese mandarinand his wife, a portrait made by American photographer Milton Miller, which frames the couple and insists on the depth of image. There is a painting included, but it exists in the same three-dimensional space as the couple, replicating Renaissance Perspective that is reinforced by the photographic lens.

Photography's applications in science

- From its inception, photography has served as a method of recording visual information, which is then subjected to interpretation, classification, and organization in archives. - Scientific endeavors have long taken advantage of the medium's unique, direct, indexical means of recording with precision the presence of whatever object,place, or person the lens has been trained upon. -In Francois Arago's report to the National Assembly in support of Daguerre's legislation to authorize his life annuity one of his primary questions was: "Is it to be expected that the sciences may derive any advantage from it?" Of course his answer was - Yes. - And so it should come as no surprise that from the beginning, photographic technologies were pressed into service by scientists in an array of disciplines—astronomy, biology, archaeology, and so on. - But the 'knowledge' produced by the camera is not as immediate as the indexical trace of the image. - The significance of these photographs is created by the organization of the knowledge being produced (even as the photographs themselves are being used as a means of proving the hypothesis in question). -In 1841-42, Wilhelm and Friedrich Langenheim opened a daguerreotype studio in Philadelphia. Known for their technical innovations, the former journalists were not the city's first but were certainly its most celebrated photographers. On May 26, 1854, the Langenheim brothers made eight sequential photographs of the first total eclipse of the sun visible in North America since the invention of photography. - John Adams Whipple collaborated with scientists at Harvard College Observatoryover the course of a decade, adapting new photographic processes to astronomical research. (daguerreotype and a salted paper print.) - After the observatory installed a new clock drive on the telescope in 1857, Whipple photographed the moon using collodion-coated glass negatives, from which they produced salted paper prints. -Trained as a botanist, Anna Atkins developed an interest in photography as a means of recording botanical specimens for a scientific reference book, British Algae:Cyanotype Impressions. -The title page in the author's own hand is part of a multi-part volume of 231 original cyanotypes featuring contact prints of British seaweed specimens reproduced by John Herschel's newly invented cyanotype or blueprinting process. (Herschel was a family friend.) - The importance of the work is summed up by TheNew York Public Library: "Photographs of British Algae is a landmark in the histories both of photography and of publishing: the first photographic work by a woman, and the first book produced entirely by photographic means." - In doing so, Atkins established photography as an accurate medium for scientific illustration.

Joseph Zealy for Louis Agassiz

- In 1850 photographer Joseph Zealy made 15 daguerreotypes of SouthCarolina slaves, at the behest of Swiss-born Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz, which have the eerie intimacy of mugshots. Today, they're the earliest known photographs of enslaved people. The Seven subjects—Jack, Drana, Delia, Renty, Fassena, Foulah or Alfred, and Jem—stripped naked, stare straight into the camera, forcing the viewer to look into the faces of people who were enslaved. - Agassiz, who was one of the most prominent biologists of the nineteenth century and a proponent of polygenesis, or the idea that different human races had different biological origins, commissioned the daguerreotypes to support his hypothesis. - But whatever scientific evidence Agassiz believed underlay his research onrace, his ideas were profoundly shaped by his racist instincts and emotions. In an oft-quoted 1846 letter to his mother, written soon after arriving in the United States, he declared: "It was in Philadelphia that I first found myself in prolonged contact with negroes...I can scarcely express to you the painful impression that I received, especially since the feeling that they inspired in me is contrary to all our ideas about the confraternity of the human type and the unique origin of our species....I experienced pity at the sight of this degraded . and degenerate race, and their lot inspired compassion in mein thinking that they are really men. Nonetheless, it is impossible for me to reprocess the feeling that they are not of the same blood as us." - Agassiz presented the Zealy daguerreotypes just once, at a meeting of the Cambridge Scientific Club in 1850; they were never published.

Photography's applications in empire

- In the years following the Civil War, the US government sponsored a series of four separate survey expeditions, to map, document, and catalog what was then a largely unknown expanse of territory, of the great American West, which would open up towhite settlers with the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869. - In 1867 Timothy O'Sullivan joined Clarence King's geological survey of the 40th parallel—the first federal expedition in the West after the Civil War. - King was charged "to direct a geological and topographical exploration of the territory between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada Mountains, including the route or routes of the Pacific railroad." - O'Sullivan's work for the King survey often functioned as both objective scientific documentation and a personal evocation of the fantastic and beautiful qualities of the western landscape. - O'Sullivan, an Irish immigrant, had started his photographic career workingfor Mathew Brady's studio in Washington, DC. He went on to become one of the noteworthy photographers documenting the Civil War, breaking off from Brady's employ with Scotsman Alexander Gardner. (The two of them photographed the aftermath of the Battleof Gettysburg) Returning to the Pyramid Lake photograph, it is interesting to note that when it was published as part of the official report on the King expedition, the lithographer who copied the photograph felt compelled to add puffy clouds in the sky (which was otherwise blank and blown out on the original negative) and sharpened the currents on the surface of the lake (which the long exposure time of the collodion hand made look uncanny). - These alterations satisfied the 19th century viewer's desire to maintain traditional pictorial motifs from landscape painting, while still leaning on the photographic accuracy and immediacy of its recording of the geological tufa dome forms. - In 1873 O'Sullivan led an independent expedition attached to theWheeler survey, visiting the Zuni and Magia pueblos and the Canyon deChelly, with its remnants of a cliff-dwelling culture. -He takes full advantage of the detail enabled by his large-format collodion negative. - Using the language of the time, O'Sullivan described photographs like these as 'mechanical' photographs, meaning that they were intended as straightforward documentation of their subject. - Somewhat ironically, as we'll see later in the course, O'Sullivan'sphotographs were revived in the context of 20th century 'straight' photography, and hailed as aesthetic masterpieces that served as unconscious predecessors for that later aesthetic movement.

Francis Galton

- Notorious for his ideas about improving the genetic composition of the human population—a field of study he called "eugenics"— Francis Galton devised the technique of composite portraiture as atool for visualizing different human "types." - He first applied the method to portraits of convicts to determine whether specific facial features could be associated with distinct types of criminality. - These composite photographs involved overprinting negatives of a number of individuals, taken in exactly the same position, to create a composite photograph. - He later went on to create composite photographs of other segments of the population whose members were considered feeble or socially inferior, including the mentally ill, tuberculosis patients, and Jews. - Later, he turned to the "healthy and talented" classes—Anglican ministers,Westminster schoolboys, doctors, scientists, and Royal Engineers.

Alphonse Bertillon (1853-1914)

- Photography found yet another social application, in the activities of the police. - Alphonse Bertillon (1853-1914), the son of a medical professor, was a French criminologist and anthropologist who created the first system of physical measurements, photography, and record-keeping that police could use to identify repeat offenders. - Before Bertillon, suspects could only be identified through eyewitness accounts and unorganized files of photographs. - Bertillon identified individuals by measurements of the head and body,shape formations of the ear, eyebrow, mouth, eye, etc., individual markings such as tattoos and scars, and personality characteristics. -The measurements were made into a formula that referred to a single unique individual, and recorded onto cards which also bore a photographic frontal and profile portrait of the suspect (the "mug shot"). -The cards were then systematically filed and cross-indexed, so they could be easily retrieved. - In 1884, Bertillon used his method to identify 241 multiple offenders, and after this demonstration, 'bertillonage' was adopted by police forces in Great Britain, Europe, and the Americas. -figured out how to catalog and archive images (1870s-80s) as well as ways to systemize (used with mugshots)

Photography and Eugenics

- Some "scientific" applications of photography from the 19th century may strike us as a bit odd. - Notorious for his ideas about improving the genetic composition of the human population—a field of study he called "eugenics"— Francis Galton devised the technique of composite portraiture as atool for visualizing different human "types." - He first applied the method to portraits of convicts to determine whether specific facial features could be associated with distinct types of criminality. - These composite photographs involved overprinting negatives of a number of individuals, taken in exactly the same position, to create a composite photograph. - He later went on to create composite photographs of other segments of the population whose members were considered feeble or socially inferior, including the mentally ill, tuberculosis patients, and Jews. - Later, he turned to the "healthy and talented" classes—Anglican ministers,Westminster schoolboys, doctors, scientists, and Royal Engineers.

Liang Shitai (Occident versus Orient, or West versus East)

-Chinese photographer -how Chinese use photography -added calligraphic elements on image, thus flattening the picture plane, destroying Renaissance perspective (that was really only in European art, not Chinese) -often eliminate shadows on face for even presentation -emphasis on face, not body -deer and plant are emblems speaking to class and longevity -more focused on meaning and symbolism rather than reality; different ways of defining what is "real" in non-Western cultures

Photography Objectifies People

-Imbue control by capturing -has much to do with context in which reproduced -reinforce power structures (John Thomson captured opium smoking in China but didn't mention British support of that industry; also did surveys of poor people when returned to London with much the same anthropological lens) -ex: Hairy Man of Mandalay, Coral, and Porcelain all seen as comparable objects

What disciplines used photography and why?

-Psychiatry, biology, ethnography/anthropology etc. -Used since there was a belief photos couldn't lie -accuracy and evidentiary quality

Anna Atkins

-Trained as a botanist, Anna Atkins developed an interest in photography as a means of recording botanical specimens for a scientific reference book, British Algae:Cyanotype Impressions. -The title page in the author's own hand is part of a multi-part volume of 231 original cyanotypes featuring contact prints of British seaweed specimens reproduced by John Herschel's newly invented cyanotype or blueprinting process. (Herschel was a family friend.) - The importance of the work is summed up by TheNew York Public Library: "Photographs of British Algae is a landmark in the histories both of photography and of publishing: the first photographic work by a woman, and the first book produced entirely by photographic means." - In doing so, Atkins established photography as an accurate medium for scientific illustration. --in the 19th century, many men and women of the upper classes were active amateur scientists -for more than a decade, scientific illustrator Anna Atkins created impeccable cyanotype impressions of algae species and other specimens; she used the technique developed by John Herschel to combine the scientific exactitude with aesthetic sensitivity to form and presentation -since her prints were originals with a one-to-one relationship the subjects, they were thought to constitute persuasive documentation -similar work was done by Thereza Llewelyn; her father John Dillwyn Llewelyn also experimented with photography (his wife was William Henry Fox Talbot's cousin); he benefited from exchanging information and photographs with men and women with similar interests

Photographic Studies of Human Expression

-the notion that inner human character could be interpreted through facial expressions persisted throughout 19th century portraiture in visual media -gallery displays of photos of public figures supported the public speculation, as did growing personal collections of photographs -writing in 1863, Oliver Wendell Holes envisaged a new human possibility called "photographic intimacy," a friendship established by the exchange of photographs, between two people who have never met -starts with exchange of letters and views of scenery, then self-portraits among personal objects, and sharing images of loved ones; would make "outer and... inner life a reality.... But for his voice, which you have never heard, you know.... Better than hundreds who call him by name, as they meet him year after year" -the conviction that a clear correspondence existed between inner moods and outward appearances also informed scientific experiments on human gestures and facial expressions, such as photographs of mental patients taken by Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond in the 1850s Duchenne de Boulogne -outwardly, the explorations undertaken by French doctor Guillaume Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne resemble Diamond's work -Duchenne was a physician who treated people with epilepsy, neurological problems, and insanity -his book The Mechanism of Human Physiognomy published in 1862 was accompanied by an atlas of 84 photographs taken of human subjects who facial muscles were stimulated by electric current -with the technical advice of photography Adrien Tournachon, Duchenne attempted to arouse through electrical stimulation the individual facial muscles that he considered involved in human expression -most of his photographs were of people with mental retardation -to aid the camera's recording, swift and subtle muscular reactions were ignored in favor of more dramatic and visible ones -Duchenne took his subjects' emotional responses to be typical of all humans; the individual's personality and distinctive range of reactions did not interest him -unlike Diamond, his work was specifically related to art as well as science -it included plates in which works of art were compared with his photographic experiments to show how art did not always show physiologically true depictions of human emotional responses -photographic historian Nancy Roth said his contemporaries found Duchenne's representations too naturalistic for art; this was occurring at the time was two approaches to painting (Courbet's realism and Ingres' idealism were clashing) Darwin -after he published The Origin of Species in 1859 and The Descent of Man in 1871, Charles Darwin completed a study that he had begun in 1838 -The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) argued that the physical signs of emotional states were inherently the same in all humans, regardless of culture, and that animals had emotions that they expressed in ways similar to people -the volume underscored Dawrin's hypothesis that humans were not a separately created species, but resulted from the processes of natural selection and evolution -about 9000 copies sold in the four four months because Darwin was a well-known, controversial author, and because the subject of emotional expression was popular at the time -his introduction acknowledged his debt to the insights and photographs made by Duchenne -his engraver who worked on the photographs was requested to temper wrinkles and remove the instrument that directed stimulation -along with illustrations provided by artists, he commissioned photographer Oscar Rejlander,m who personal acted out some of the emotional states before the camera -believing that babies exhibited the purest, least acculturated signs of emotion, Darwin used photographs of babies made by Rejlander and photography Adolph Diedrich Kindermann -Darwin investigated the means by which photographs might be inexpensively included in the text; this had proved difficult because the presses that printed text ran too fast to reproduce photographs and type at the same time, and because most photographs need to be printed on special paper, not newsprint -a technique known as heliotype, invented by Ernest Edwards, used printing-press plates to reproduce photographs, and thus keep down the price of the book -the resulting images are not sharp and detailed, but they do convey facial gestures adequately Charcot -like his teacher Duchenne, French physician and neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot worked at La Salpetriere, where he drew upon photographs to document his case studies, and was interested in the expression of emotion in art -in one sense, he carried Duchenne's work to an extreme, making weekly public presentations of his patients, many of them female, to an audience of scientists and socialites -his particular concern with hysteria attracted his most famous admirer, Sigmund Freud -from 1877 to 1880, Charcot published Photographic Iconography of the Salpetriere Hospital, a three volume work that contained photographs of hysterics -collaborating with clinician Desire Magliore Bourneville and assisted by Paul Regnard, an intern, Charcot sought to photograph the physical expression of mental states -he chose subjects who were well-known throughout France to be able to respond well to hypnotic suggestion -like Hugh Welch Diamond, Duchenne, and Darwin, Charcot's work and photographs emphasized facial expression as a infallible indicator of psychological states; he also, like them, thought of himself as a neutral observer

Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire by James R. Ryan Review by: Eleanor M. Hight and John R. Gold

-the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized were encoded in such photographic displays of exotic otherness. -In each case study, photography was a silent but visible partner in the subjugation of native peoples and the dissemination of imperialist propaganda. People, like animals, were to be conquered and controlled; the savage and the savage landscape needed to be civilized. -Though photography is appropriately seen here more as a social practice than as objective documentation, it is--as Ryan himself reminds us (following the lines of Roland Barthes, Rosalind Krauss, and others) - indexical in nature. -The photographic image refers to something which once existed but which has been visually restructured by cultural attitudes, aesthetic practices, and photography's own syntax.

The Harvard Case for the Agassiz Images

A researcher at a Harvard museum rediscovered the photosin 1976, and the university has sold reproduction rights to them since that time. - Tamara Lanier, of Norwich, Connecticut, is suing the Ivy Leagueschool for "wrongful seizure, possession and expropriation" of images she said depict two of her ancestors. Her suit, filed inMassachusetts state court, demands Harvard immediately turn over the photos, acknowledge her ancestry and pay an unspecified sum in damages. - The suit attacks Harvard for "exploitation" of Renty's image at a 2017 conference, among other uses. It said Harvard capitalized on the photos by demanding a "hefty" licensing fee to reproduce the images. It also draws attention to a book Harvard sells for $40 with Renty's portrait on the cover. -The suit asks Harvard to acknowledge it bears responsibility for the humiliation of Renty and Delia, and that the university "wascomplicit in perpetuating and justifying the institution of slavery". - Lanier alleges she wrote to Harvard in 2011 detailing herties to Renty. In a letter to Drew Faust, then Harvard's president, Lanier said she wanted to learn more about the images and how they would be used. She was more explicit in 2017, demanding that Harvard relinquish the photos.In both cases, she said, Harvard responded but evaded her requests. -The school has used the photos as part of itsown effort to confront its historical ties to slavery. At the 2017 conference called "Universities and Slavery: Bound by History",referenced in the lawsuit, Harvard printed Renty's portrait on the program cover and projected it on a giant screen abovethe stage.

Milton Miller (Occident versus Orient, or West versus East)

British -how European/Americans use photography -portrait -clearly understand the space their in (European Renaissance perspective) -table with painting speaks to class and another object within frame -Orientalism and exoticism -more focused on reality rather than meaning or symbolism

How do you measure the truth of a photograph?

Ex: Dr. Morton controversy (-series of daguerreotypes taken in Boston, Massachusetts by Southworth and Hawes combined notions associated with older media like printmaking and painting with emergent ideas about purpose of photography -as result, not clear if photos showed actual first surgery in which ether was used to relieve pain during an operation or if the event was re-enacted for the camera) -concept of orchestrating was not viewed as a lie (ex: Fenton's Shadow of the Valley of Death image with placed cannonballs); not ethically wrong -people aren't sensitized to manipulation of photos till after WWI -ways in which knowledge is formed and how it's used

Jones Lamprey

The application of photography to human beings often present difficult issues. In 1869 Jones H. Lamprey, a member of both the Ethnographic Society of London and the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), attempted to standardize the photography of indigenous peoples with what came to be known as the "Lamprey Grid." - It consisted of a large black panel with white strings stretched vertically and horizontally across its surface to form a grid of two-inch squares. Nude aboriginal subjects were to be photographed standing before the grid in frontal and profile views. - The two-inch squares would thus provide the means to make anthropometric studies of the subjects

Timothy O'Sullivan

Timothy O'Sullivan and Survey Photography -journey of a party of young men on an important surveying expedition to a section of the Rocky Mountains and the great basin westward was sponsored by the US Congress and carried out by the United States Engineers -was directed by Clarence R. King -followed part of the proposed route of the transcontinental railroad, and included Timothy O'Sullivan as the official photographer -he journeyed through the West after the Civil War and made views of lava domes of Pyramid Lake as well the Comstock mine -he was scarcely back in Washington DC when he joined another survey -the Darien Survey Expedition of 1870 set out to explore the isthmus of Darien (or Panama), led by Lieutenant Commander Thomas O. Selfridge under the auspices of the secretary of the navy -the group also included sixty Marines, a show of force for Panamanian people, who suspected the proposed canal would endanger their way of life -O'Sullivan found it difficult to photograph in the jungle due to the humidity, the frequent rain, and thick vegetation (which allowed little light to penetrate), but he still made many images (stereo and glass plates) -some of his pictures adapt the Panamanian landscape to Western tastes -he accompanied two other important American surveys: the 1871 United States Geographical Survey West of the 100th Meridian, commonly called the Wheeler Survey, and an independent 1873 survey sponsored by leader of the Wheeler Survey (George Montague Wheeler) to photograph Native Americans and the ruins of a cliff-dwelling culture in the Canon de Chelly, in what is now Arizona -the trip's reputation was tarnished in the press for having allegedly abandoned two white guides, and resulted in the shooting dead of several Native Americans -the photographs, however, depict none of the ill-feeling or tragedy of the journey, indicating that he, like many 19th century photographers, understood his documentary work was bound by his assignment and by commercial considerations