DAY 62

HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY

Photography and the American Civil War

BIRTH OF THE DOCUMENTARY

One of the most significant milestones in the cultural, if not technical, development of photography and war photojournalism was in documenting America’s War Between the States. Daguerreotypist Mathew Brady, who was already a successful commercial photographer, acclaimed for, among other things, his portraits of famous Americans, recognized the cultural value of documenting such an important historical event. He assembled a team that included Timothy O’Sullivan and Alexander Gardner and as many as 100 others and set out to record the epic scale of the conflict. Brady and his staff captured images of the encampments, the major personalities, some battles, and, perhaps most significantly, the aftermath of those battles: fields strewn with the bodies of fallen Americans.

While a few daguerreotypes of the 1846 Mexican-American War had been made and the Crimean War in 1855 had been documented with photographs by Roger Fenton and Felice Beato, they paled in scale and scope to the work done by Brady and his staff.

Gardner published the two-volume Photographic Sketch Book of the War, which contained 100 photographs and accompanying text. The book caused a great deal of excitement, not so much because it was such a graphic account of the horrors of war and the day-to-day life of the soldiers (in fact many of the images had already been readily available to the public), but because publishing a book with original photographs was fairly uncommon at the time. —DJG