Framing Silver’s Void in Timothy H. O'Sullivan’s Photographs of the Gould & Curry Mine

Abstract

In his groundbreaking novel Roughing It, the American satirist Mark Twain described the silver mines of the Comstock Lode in Virginia City, Nevada, as “clean-picked ribs and bones of some colossal skeleton” and “a coffin that has no end to it.”1 As the center of the silver mining industry in the United States, Virginia City was the product of hundreds of miles of underground tunnels created for the extraction of precious metal. These mines became an international sensation in the late nineteenth century because of the “unlimited” or “inexhaustible” silver they provided not only for currency but also for dining services, jewelry, and photography. A photograph formed from silver, Crushed Timbers (fig. 1) shifts focus away from the sensational ore to tell a darker story about the timber “ribs and bones” that held open the subterranean spaces in the ore’s absence. Ends of squared timbers jut into the frame from above, dominating the upper half of the composition. Strong light from both sides creates extreme shadows, sharpening the angularity of the beams while also abstracting the wooden surfaces. A small pickax is driven into a structural beam in the upper left corner, while a worker’s leg uncomfortably protrudes into the scene at lower right, his body dramatically cut by a vertical support cast entirely in shadow. These compositional elements compress the photographic frame to produce a sense of claustrophobia, almost as if to entomb its contents. And yet, the focus on timber over silver suggests entanglements with the surface above.