Civil War

The Civil War was the first American war that ordinary people saw in photographs, and it was a shock. In October 1862 Mathew Brady's New York gallery showed pictures of the dead at Antietam, taken in the days after the battle. A writer for The New York Times said Brady had brought home the reality of war as if he had laid the bodies on the doorstep.

Brady's name is on many of the war's photographs, but much of the field work was done by the men who worked for him or with him, among them Alexander Gardner and Timothy O'Sullivan. They traveled with darkroom wagons, because the wet plate process of the time meant each glass plate had to be coated, exposed and developed within minutes.

Those slow plates explain what the pictures show. Exposures took several seconds, so no one could photograph a battle in progress. What survives are camps, soldiers posing in groups, officers in front of tents, fortifications, ruined towns and battlefields after the fighting had stopped. O'Sullivan's photographs of the dead at Gettysburg in July 1863 are among the hardest images of the war to look at.

The battle prints are a different thing entirely. Currier & Ives turned out lithographs of battles within weeks, with flags flying, generals on rearing horses and neat lines of advancing troops. In the 1880s the Chicago firm Kurz & Allison published a long series of brightly colored battle prints for veterans and their families. These were made to remember and to sell, not to report.

Worth noticing is that some photographs were arranged. Historians have shown that at Gettysburg Gardner's team moved at least one body to a more dramatic spot among the rocks at Devil's Den and photographed it there. That does not make the death any less real, but it is a reminder that even the earliest war photographers were thinking about the picture. Look at the backgrounds too. The fences, trees and farmhouses in these photographs can often still be found on the battlefields today.