931
Engineers’ Sergeant James MacDonald took at least 300
pictures of geographical and ethnographic interest. The
construction of the Suez Canal was underway during
the survey, and it is hard not to imagine MacDonald’s
record and the survey report of value in Britain’s politi-
cal designs to dominant the seas and global transport
(Howe 2003, 237). Activity in the Middle East was not
limited to Europeans: Egyptian Colonel Muhammad
Sadiq (or Sadic Bey), skilled in photography, explored
Arabia around 1880 with the intent to map the vast
terrain. Sadiq did not use the camera an offi cial capac-
ity, but photographed places that would not ordinarily
welcome western investigation, most notably the holy
city of Medina (Madinah).
The Great Surveys of the American West following
the Civil War refl ect a similar correspondence—even
tension—between military and civil patronage and
the meaning of photographs. The case of Timothy
O’Sullivan’s work for three different expeditions
following his employment with Mathew Brady and
Alexander Gardner during the Civil War is particularly
instructive. The War Department in association with
the army’s Chief of Engineers was a major sponsor of
Clarence King’s U.S. Geological Exploration of the
Fortieth Parallel, for which he hired the experienced
O’Sullivan. This was a matter of expediency on King’s
part in order to gain the support of Washington. His
work was an essentially civilian enterprise, albeit with
the Union’s strategic interests at stake; the government
would see the value of King’s reports from the vantage
point of economic prosperity and potential settlement
in along the transcontinental railway. The U.S. Army
tended to see itself traditionally in the leadership role of
explorations of the western territories. Thus Brigadier
General Andrew A Humphreys, the Chief of Engineers
who backed George Montague Wheeler’s U.S. Geo-
graphic Surveys West of the One Hundredth Meridian,
looked at the civilian surveys of Powell and Hayden, as
“bureaucratic rivals.” How this actually plays out in the
photography and reports of the Great Surveys reveals
a fascination with the desert and arid mountainous
regions of the Great Basin, from geological features to
artifacts of the vanishing tribes. The displacement of
Native Americans must be considered in any consider-
ation of western expansion and enterprises like King’s
or Wheeler’s. Documentation of the current hostilities
between the US and the Indian nations was relatively
limited in contrast to the preoccupation with their heri-
tage and remains, as seen in O’Sullivan’s picturing of the
cliff dwellings in the Cañon de Chelle, New Mexico, for
the Wheeler survey in 1873. O’Sullivan worked as well
for the 1870 season in the Isthmus of Darién (Panama)
under Lieutenant-Commander Thomas O’Selfridge of
the U.S. Navy. From a military standpoint, mapping
and identifying areas through photographic reconnoiter-
ing, as in the instance of Panama in preparation for the
proposed canal, proved useful for the future security of
U.S. interests.
Photographs related to military reconnaissance and
exploration or civil operations with military associations
contributed to an archive that would assist in ordering
a world which, in the previous century, remained only
partially comprehended. Set within the context of in-
stitutional reports, collections, exhibitions, and popular
printed formats such as the stereograph and the wood
engraving, photographs were instrumental in serving
to engender a geographical identity for regions under
industrial development or surveillance. The process
of identifi cation and recognition of subjects, repeated
through the dissemination of photographic reproduc-
tions, played to imaginative conceits of the observer.
Documentary photographs could not function outside of
the symbolic and the utilitarian basis of their production,
for which there were ideological assumptions underly-
ing the original objectives of expeditionary and military
enterprises. Such ventures yielding a photographic re-
cord circulated in the public domain had a galvanizing
role in the “civilizing mission” of the west by reinforcing
the power and presence of modern industrial nations
throughout the world.
Gary D Sampson
See also: Biggs, Colonel Thomas; Burke, John;
Durieu, Jean-Louis-Marie-Eugène; Egerton, Philp
H.; Fenton, Roger; Le Gray, Gustave; McCosh, John;
O’Sullivan, Timothy Henry; Tripe, Linnaeus; Tytler,
Harriet and Robert C.; Documentary; Expedition
Photography; Landscape; Mountain Photography;
Panoramic Photography; Science; Survey
Photography; and War Photography.Further Readings
Egerton, Philip Henry, Journal of a Photographic Trip through
Spiti, to the Frontier of Chinese Thibet, with Photographic
Illustrations, London: Cundall, Downes and Co., 1864.
Frizot, Michel, ed., A New History of Photography, Köln: Köne-
mann, 1998.
Howe, Katherine, “Mapping a Sacred Geography: Photographic
Surveys by the Royal Engineers in the Holy Land, 1864–68.”
In Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical
Imagination, edited by Schwartz, Joan M., and James R. Ryan,
London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2003.
Kelsey, Robert, “Viewing the Archive: Timothy O’Sullivan’s
Photographs for the Wheeler Survey, 1871–74.” In Art Bul-
letin, v. 85 no. 4 (December 2003): 702–23.
Marien, Mary Warner, Photography: A Cultural History, New
York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002.
Khan, Omar, From Kashmir to Kabul: The Photographs of John
Burke and William Baker 1860–1900, Munich: Prestel, and
Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing, 2002.
Pinney, Christopher, and Nicolas Peterson, eds., Photography’s
Other Histories, Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
Ryan, James R., Picturing Empire: Photography and the