Some of the most celebrated images of nineteenth-century American photography emerged from government-sponsored geological surveys whose purpose was to study and document western territories.

Timothy H. O’Sullivan and William Bell, two survey photographers who joined expeditions in the 1860s and 1870s, opened the eyes of nineteenth-century Americans to the western frontier. Highlighting a recent Smart Museum of Art acquisition, One/Many brings together an exquisite group of photographs by Bell and O’Sullivan.

Particularly noteworthy are their photographic panoramas, assemblages of individual images joined together to form a continuous, horizontal landscape view. These panoramas have not been exhibited in well over a century and have never before been published.