Combat-Zone Photography

The Civil War

The Civil War was the first war where a vivid and extensive collection of photographs documented the preparations and aftermath of combat. With the development of the ambriotype wetplate process, which produced a negative on a glass plate, photographers could leave their studios and visit the actual scenes of battles. Ambriotypes still required long exposure times and immediate development of the negative— [Page 171]technical limitations that curtailed the possibility of photographing movement. Although no photographs of battles exist, Civil War photographers documented all aspects of the training camp experience, the postbattle carnage, and the physical devastation wrought in the South.

Mathew Brady's photographs are the most famous Civil War images, although because of his poor eyesight Brady hired a corps of assistants to take the actual photographs, which he then displayed in his much-visited New York gallery. Alexander Gardner, one of Brady's assistants, opened his own gallery in 1863 and with Timothy O'Sullivan produced some of the most memorable images of the war. Americans viewed war photographs by visiting a gallery or buying published sketchbooks. They also purchased individual photographs to arrange in private albums or viewed 3-D slides through stereoscopes. Without the ability to reproduce photographs, newspapers used engravings based on original photographs to disseminate the images.

Mathew Brady's 1862 Civil War photograph “The Dead of Antietam.” (From the collections of the Library of Congress)

Two different traditions of battlefield photography emerged during the war. The first focused on the human carnage and the second on the land where famous battles took place. O'Sullivan and Gardner became famous for their photographs of dead Confederate soldiers; images such as “Harvest of Death” depicted rows of fallen Confederate troops waiting for burial, while “A Sharpshooter's Last Sleep” focused on the death of one man. Captions accompanying these photographs highlighted the importance of preserving the Union, thus weakening any possibility of these [Page 172]images fostering sympathy for the enemy. When displaying photographs of Union dead, photographers highlighted the soldiers' heroic sacrifice for the cause but still faced some public criticism over turning personal tragedies into public spectacles. Much later, Gardner's Gettysburg photographs became controversial for a different reason, when historian William Frasinito revealed that in some cases, such as “A Sharpshooter's Last Sleep,” Gardner and O'Sullivan had rearranged the body to create a better image. Outright falsification and the mislabeling of places in other photographs compromised the usefulness of these photographs for studying actual events on the battlefield.

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