Archive Style is an excellent book. Focusing on three U.S. survey artists—one well-known, two others obscure—Robin Kelsey shows that American expeditionary art of the nineteenth century is more pictorially innovative and more rigorous than many readers might have thought. “The representation of straightforwardness has never been straightforward,” he writes (5); and Archive Style, like the work of the artists it studies, like many strong books that lucidly examine the mysterious subtleties and intricacies of their topics, is a labyrinth laid in a straight line. Timothy O’Sullivan is Kelsey’s better-known subject, the focus of the second of the book’s three long chapters. Traveling in the West with the King and Wheeler surveys every year but one between 1867 and 1874, O’Sullivan made photographs such as Pyramid and Tufa Domes, Pyramid Lake, Nevada and Ancient Ruins in the Cañon de Chelle, N. M. These images have previously been seen, if at all, as relatively generic if singularly heroic examples of western photography. The few who have attempted an account of the way the photographs look—Ansel Adams, who saw Cañon de Chelle as modernist before its time; Rosalind Krauss, who dismissed the idea that the photographs had anything so exalted as a style—missed...