O’Sullivan’s war photographs

 American photographer. He was employed in the studio of Mathew Brady in Washington, DC, when the Civil War (1861–5) broke out. After photographing the early stages of the war in South Carolina, he left Brady’s studio to work for Alexander Gardner, and almost one half of the photographs in Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the War (?New York, 1866/R1959) are by him. O’Sullivan’s war photographs, like Gardner’s, moved beyond the superficial documentation of battlefields and the mundane activities of armies, and he began to photograph the grim reality of war; he is particularly noted for his photographs of battlefield dead