I went to see “Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O’Sullivan” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum today. He has always been one of my favorite landscape photographers for many of the reasons as most that have been influenced by him. The main one being that for someone making work in the 1860′s and 1870′s his work looks remarkably modern. Most landscape work from that time seems to be straight document and not really have much more to them. O’Sullivan manages to pull off the document and still convey some kind of emotional sense as well. His photographs to me have this great feeling of solitude and vastness. They also seem very bleak, but still beautiful. It was really nice to see that big a group of his work in one place. Inspiring for sure. There is a Flickr stream of a bunch of his photographs that the Library of Congress has here.