Photography and the American Civil War
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Through September 2
At the heart of this sprawling exhibit of 200-plus images is an engrossing question: How did the Civil War change what Americans thought of—and did with— photography? To illustrate, the displays run the gamut from mounted large-format shots of battlefields to cases filled with tiny tintype portraits, keepsakes of loved ones pulled into the bloody maw of war.
Early photography was static; action shots would just be blurs. But entrepreneurial photographers like Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner suggested battlefield violence by focusing on the macabre aftermath and proved the public would buy what Brady termed his “fearful reproductions.”
Brady marketed these battle images, singly and bound into books, but he took very few of them himself. Alexander Gardner, who started his career managing Brady’s gallery, was appointed staff photographer for the Army of the Potomac and began his own business. Like Brady, he employed teams of photographers to shoot scenes now etched into our memories. Unlike Brady, who put his own name on all the resulting work, Gardner allotted his workers, including the sharp-eyed George Barnard, full credit. Nevertheless, Brady’s books of Civil War photos far outsold his.
On the exhibit walls, key wartime areas from Fort Sumter to Lookout Mountain to Cold Spring, from Edisto Island to Antietam to Atlanta to Richmond, are stark, eerie ruins, often strewn with carcasses (at times artfully rearranged), often with superimposed “cloudscapes” filling a sky whited out by the long camera exposures—the war’s “big picture.” In the display cases, the parade of faces reminds you who the fighters, the wounded and the dead were—each family’s investment in the war. The unspoken dialog between these two themes infuses the exhibition with deep emotional and historical resonance.
Originally published in the October 2013 issue of American History. To subscribe, click here.
