Almost 130 years have passed since O’Sullivan took his Native American photographs and they way we interact with them has drastically changed. When Easterners first saw these photos, they were shocked by how real the subjects were. Easterners noticed the attention O’Sullivan payed to depicting each native culture accurately. O’Sullivan’s photos stood out against other Native American images for being wildly different.

Today, the average viewer doesn’t see the differences between O’Sullivan’s images and other Native American photos. When our team first looked at these images, we thought O’Sullivan had purposefully portrayed the stereotypical image of a Native American. Being so removed from the context of the 1870s, we did not have a great knowledge of what was real and what was not. All we knew was that Anglo-Americans notoriously misunderstood native culture during that time period. Most viewers today are not familiar enough with native culture at that time period to be able to see the differences that Easterners spotted right away.

This reveals the importance of digging further into photos than just a quick glance. By giving a cursory look over O’Sullivan’s pictures, we miss a lot of rich detail within the photo and the intention of O’Sullivan as the photographer. However, when we consider the five w’s (who, what, where, when, why), we get a much richer understanding of what we’re actually seeing.