Why Was The Widespread Use Of The Camera Significant During And After The Civil War?

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Photography that inverse the way we view war

July 8, 2013 / four:54 PM / CBS News

Images from the Ceremonious War 07:xiv

(CBS News) From the days of the primeval cameras, photography has been changing the way nosotros come across the globe. The Images of war captured on American battlefields a century-and-a-one-half ago fabricated the Civil War very real to Americans of the fourth dimension . . . and they even so make that war very existent to the states today. Martha Teichner takes u.s. back:

Within hours of the autumn of Fort Sumter, on April 14, 1861, harm from the Confederate bombardment of it that started the Civil War had been photographed.

This was something new -- the first time Americans would see images of war, as information technology really looked . . . the first time true likenesses of the people who lived and died in the conflict remained equally a tape, profoundly shaping our understanding of the bloodiest war in U.S. history.

"When the Civil War began, photography was really in its infancy, it was just 20 years old," said Jeff Rosenheim, who heads the photography department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

He is too curator of the exhibition, "Photography and the American Civil War."

He showed Teichner examples of portraits taken of Civil War soldiers.

"They were kept in little pocket albums, little leather albums, both past regular soldiers and by officers," said Rosenheim. "They were kept on the person, next to your middle."

Such as the portrait found in the hands of a expressionless soldier afterwards the Battle of Gettysburg.

In these portraits, you see how young the soldiers were -- often, just boys -- or how ferocious they tried to look, such every bit the portrait of the 4 Pattillo Brothers, each belongings a behemothic blade.

From left: Benjamin, George, James and John Pattillo, of Henry Canton, Ga., are pictured holding a Bowie or side knife. They has joined Company K of the 22nd Regiment of the Georgia Volunteer Infantry. David Wynn Vaughn Collection

Photographs were already cheap -- l to 75 cents, with a fancy folding case, or 5 to ten cents printed like glorified postcards.

Subjects had to sit down or stand up absolutely notwithstanding for as long as eight seconds then. Pictures were taken on drinking glass plates, and printed outside in the lord's day.

At that place were field studios in tents with skylights. Very early on, photograph supplies became near impossible to go far the S, so photographers followed the Union armies, and edged closer and closer to the battleground.

The Civil War: The birth of photojournalism — The Civil State of war: The birth of photojournalism 36 photos

Photojournalism was born during the Ceremonious War, though with limitations: You could take pictures earlier the battle, and later on the battle, but not during the battle, because of the long exposures required. "The camera actually couldn't capture that movement," said Rosenheim.

Alexander Gardner'due south camera captured the dead of Antietam, after the bloodiest battle of our bloodiest war, on Sept. 17, 1862. In fact, our bloodiest day ever, with 23,000 expressionless and wounded.

And and so came Gettysburg the following summer -- 150 years ago this by week.

The dazzler of the place belies the awfulness in Gardner'southward photographs, shocking to this solar day. You lot can still match locations at present with then, which adds to the intrigue of a famous photographic controversy.

Rosenheim showed Teichner two images of a fallen Confederate soldier: One titled "Dwelling of a Rebel Sharpshooter," and some other, "Sharpshooter's Last Slumber."

It's the same sharpshooter in both pictures.

How did that happen? "Some suggest that the photographer, Gardner, and his assistant, Timothy O'Sullivan, found it in the open field and moved it to this little nesty expanse," said Rosenheim. "Other people believe that the body was found here and removed by a burying item to this [other] location."

Pictures of the wounded were equally gruesome. A Washington surgeon used them to teach medical students.

There were also photographs taken of emancipated slaves; the piddling four-inch pictures were sold to raise coin for the education of former slaves in Louisiana. But abolitionists quickly figured out they were a powerful argument for the anti-slavery crusade -- as in the images of slave children who wait white, or the 1863 photo of an emancipated slave whose brow diameter the scars of a brand, the initials of the Louisiana plantation owner who once owned him.

One photo, championship "The Scourged Back," found its manner into the picture, "Lincoln."

Abraham Lincoln understood the importance of photography fifty-fifty before the Civil War. A photograph taken in 1860 by Mathew Brady, America's most famous lensman at the time, was reproduced in many forms, including entrada buttons. Information technology was widely believed to have gotten candidate Lincoln elected president.

He was photographed often during his presidency -- the change in him, as the war took its toll, very plain. And when he was assassinated in April 1865, photography was part of the manhunt, with the kickoff wanted poster in American history illustrated with photographs.

"Photography was everywhere," said Rosenheim. "It had really saturated American order, and they just needed to actually go to the boarding firm, to the family homes, to the friends of the likely conspirators to find pictures of them."

John Wilkes Booth was killed. Iv were hanged. Pictures taken at the gallows were printed and sold. People collected them, recognizing that the story they told was important.

"I think that nosotros are, as a nation, only as good equally our memory," said Rosenheim, "and the facts of these photographs, their tradition, gives u.s. something that we cannot forget.

What we really accept is the beginning of an annal -- an annal of who we are, or at least who we were," said Rosenheim. "That is the treasury that we build our history from."

For more than info:

"Photography and the American Ceremonious War" at the Metropolitan Museum of Fine art (through September two); The exhibit will so exist at the Gibbes Museum, Charleston, S.C. (September 27, 2013-January 5, 2014), and then the New Orleans Museum of Art (January 31-May 4, 2014).
Catalogue, "Photography and the American Civil War" (The Met)
Gettysburg National War machine Park
Antietam National Battlefield