Photography in the U.S. civil war
Margery Clark
The U.S. Civil war heralded with it many
changes from 1860 to 1865. Photography is one of the most telling examples of
how things changed very quickly and would never be the same again. Before the
war started photography was still fairly new, rather expensive and carried an
elitist quality about it. At that time, the famous Civil war photographer
Mathew Brady, was running a successful gallery selling portraits of famous or
noteworthy men and women of the day. His photographs had become famous because
of their artistic composition. Even the Queen of England honored him for his artistic
intuition. Something in him changed at the outbreak of the war and he knew he
needed to document what was happening. He sold or abandoned his lucrative
business to photograph the civil war. “I had to go. A spirit in my feet said
“go”, and I went” he is famously quoted as saying.
The
types of photography changed rapidly during the war. While the war started with
Daguerreotype being the usual method of photography, it quickly moved on to wet
plate Ambrotype and then Tintype. Daguerreotype was costly and you could only
produce one print from a negative. Ambrotype used a glass plate to capture the
images and could be used more than once but was fragile and the wagons carrying
the glass plates into a battle field was not ideal. The Tin type was cheap and
easier to carry. Brady had, at the start of the war, brought Alexander Gardner
to America from Ireland. He was a chemist as well as a photographer and helped
Brady keep up with the changes in photography. The changes also came at a time
when the war losses were becoming great. People no longer wanted portraits of political
figures but small pictures to remember soldiers they might never see again.
Mathew Brody had a grand vision of sharing
what was happening all over in the war. He dispatched several corps of
photographers. After all, he couldn’t be everywhere at once. This brings into
question one photographer being credited for another’s’ work. I think now most
photographers are credited with their name and then who they are photographing
for. Standard school pictures, dance pictures or pictures from a specific
studio are credited to the studio, not the photographer. I think the art was so
young that they hadn’t worked out how to acknowledge who the pictures really
belonged to. I think if you sign on with a studio you do give up some of your
right to claim the photographs. But if you are an independent photographer you
can retain those rights unless you decide to sell. It’s a hard and
uncomfortable truth to the artist.
The battles of the civil war were some of the
bloodiest and saddest in this country’s history. Brody had a sense of how
photographs would tell the tales that dead men could not. The “ethics of moving
a gun to create a better photograph” kind of go out the window with such
atrocities. Brody needed people to see the story. It was a story no one wanted
to see at the time. Only now, 150 years later do we see why he did what he did.
Why a man would go to his death penniless and misunderstood just to remind us
of this story of truth.
References:
Lanier, H.W.
(2014). Photographing the Civil War. Son of the South. Retrieved from
http://www.sonofthesouth.net/civil-war-pictures/photography/photography.htm
Osborne, J. M.
(1995). Mathew B. Brady. Retrieved
from http://users.dickinson.edu/~osborne/404_98/whitep.htm
Civil War. (n.d.).
In The History Place online. Retrieved from
http://www.historyplace.com/civilwar/#lee_surr
Ambrotype &
Tintype. (2013). In PhotoTree.com. Retrieved
from http://www.phototree.com/ID_Amb.htm
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