DK - The American Civil War

I

n January 1858, Mathew Brady

opened a photographic studio in

Washington, D. C., hiring a young

Scotsman named Alexander Gardner to

run it. The most famous photographer

in America, New York-based Brady had

made his name with his portraits of the

illustrious men and women of the era.

From portraits to battlegrounds

People saw their likenesses in delicate

ambrotypes, each a unique image on

glass produced by the wet-plate

collodion process and enclosed in a

small case, or on popular cartes de visite,

photographic visiting cards consisting

of prints made from negatives and

often collected in leather albums.

Wet-plate camera

A mahogany-encased wet-plate camera of Civil War vintage.

After a sensitized glass plate was inserted into the plate

holder, the holder would be slotted into the back of the

camera and the lens focused with the focusing lever.

GRANT, SHERMAN, AND TOTAL WAR 1864

BEFORE

Only two decades old, photography
on the eve of the Civil War had
attracted a mass following.

WET-PLATE PHOTOGRAPHY
Wet-plate photography took hold in the
1850s. A glass plate coated in collodion (a
mixture of bromide and iodides) was dipped
in a photosensitive silver nitrate solution and
exposed in the camera. Some versions
produced single positive images, others
negatives from which prints could be made.

WAR PHOTOGRAPHY
Although a few photographs were made
during the War with Mexico (1847– 48), it
was in the Crimean War (1853–56) that British
photographer Roger Fenton, with more than
350 negatives, pioneered war photography.

ILLUSTRATED JOURNALS
There were no means of reproducing photographs
in journals—the scenes had first to be engraved
on wood. The mainstays of such popular
magazines as Harper’s Weekly were talented
sketch artists, such as Alfred Waud, and the
engravers who brought their work to the public.

Photography in the War

The American Civil War was the first conflict to be thoroughly documented by the camera.

Thanks to such photographers as Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner, many of its images

are among the world’s most moving and memorable views of war in the 19th century.

The business of portraiture was

booming by the time the Civil War

began. Photographers set up makeshift

studios wherever the soldiers pitched

their tents. Many portraits taken of

soldiers were tintypes. A less expensive

alternative to ambrotypes, tintypes

were also produced using the wet-

plate collodion process, but a thin

sheet of blackened iron replaced glass

as the image substrate, making them

more robust than ambrotypes. They

could be mailed safely to sweethearts

and loved ones. But whatever the

format, hundreds of thousands of

small portraits were made during the

Civil War. Many survive, and though

their subjects’ identities may have long

Camera case

Plate holder

Shutter

faded away, their images remain,

some elegant and refined, others

tremulously hopeful, still others

swaggering, brandishing swords or

pistols—all insisting, in the words of

one historian: “I was here. Remember

me when I’m gone.”

As well as being the first conflict

to have its participants thus

immortalized, the Civil War was also

the first to have its field operations

The estimated

number of

photographs made during the war, over

90 percent of which were portraits.

1,000,000

Carte de visite
This photographic card depicts a Union soldier. Such
inexpensive portrait cards were extremely popular with
soldiers, and could be sent through the mail in
an ordinary envelope.

Focusing lever

Bellows for focusing

Camera back

Lens