Library of CongressPhotographer Timothy O’Sullivan poses along a section of earthworks at Petersburg, Virginia.
Petersburg was one of the most photographed sites of the Civil War, especially when it came to the vast network of fortifications that, by 1865, stretched for miles outside the Virginia city.
When the war ended, two young photographers, Timothy O’Sullivan and William Redish Pywell, were working for Alexander Gardner when they took more than 30 stereo photographs of the earthworks and trenches soldiers dug in 1864 and 1865 over the 292-day Siege of Petersburg. This image shows O’Sullivan, 25, posing along one section of earthworks that included elaborate “bombproof” shelters, one of which even had a fireplace with chimney.
For more than a century after the war, no photographs were known to exist of O’Sullivan, who made many great images of the Civil War and, afterward, of the American West before he died in 1882.
In his 1966 book, Timothy O’Sullivan: America’s Forgotten Photographer, author James D. Horan published a single portrait he identified as O’Sullivan—yet it was not him. Since then, a couple of studio portraits have emerged as well as the discovery that Sullivan and Pywell posed separately in more than a dozen of the fortification images. They often traded places, shooting the same scene with O’Sullivan posing and then Pywell.
Very few of the Petersburg fortifications photos were printed and sold; stereo views of these images rarely if ever appear in today’s antique photo market. All the negatives still exist, however, most of them in outstanding condition. They are part of the Gardner’s Gallery collection of more than 1,800 stereo and large glass plate negatives preserved at the Library of Congress.
Bob Zeller is president of the nonprofit Center for Civil War Photography, which is devoted to collecting, preserving, and digitizing Civil War images.
