In the South, A. D. Lytle of Louisiana
worked for the Confederate Secret
Service, slyly documenting Union
activities in occupied Baton Rouge.
He was among those Southern
photographers—including George
Smith Cook, called the “Photographer
of the Confederacy” for the range
of his coverage—who had to
smuggle their chemicals from New
York, the iodides and bromides
labeled “quinine.”
Those not employed by the
government had commercial contracts
and passes permitting them access in
military areas. Brady’s teams were
preeminent among them, frequently
seen bumping around in horse-drawn
portable darkrooms the soldiers
dubbed “what-is-it?” wagons. The
men worked in pairs, one setting up
the tripod and camera, while the
other, working in the por-table
darkroom, mixed the chemicals and
spread them over the glass or metal
plate, sensitizing it to light. They had
but a few short minutes in which to
prepare the plate, take the picture, get
the exposed plate to the darkroom,
and develop it before the fast-drying
collodion solution lost its sensitivity.
A single exposure might entail a
half-hour’s work. The collodion was
also limited in its photosensitivity;
20 or 30 seconds might be needed
to make a good exposure on overcast
days. Photographers either settled
for static landscape shots or posed
their pictures.
Though the U.S. Army Medical
Department compiled seven volumes
of photographs of grotesquely
disfiguring battlefield injuries, no Civil
War images have proved so haunting
as the several dozen exposures madedocumented. In 1861, Brady was
determined to photograph every facet
of the war, dispatching teams of
photographers to cover as many armies
as he could get permits for. Most of
the leading cameramen of the day,
including Gardner, Timothy O’Sullivan,
George Barnard, and James Reekie,
worked for Brady at one time or
another. But every image produced
by a photographer on his payroll was
nevertheless credited “Photo by
Brady,” perhaps because he bore the
considerable expense
of putting them in
the field. Gardner
eventually left to set up
his own shop, enticing
O’Sullivan and others
to join him.
Field activity
Brady’s access to the war
was not exclusive. Other
photographers were
active, some under
contract to the
government. Captain
Andrew Russell shot the
railroads, trestle bridges,
and supply depots of the
Railroad Construction
Corps, as well as military
burials, gun emplacements,
and the burned ruins of
Richmond. Still others
were employed at Union
headquarters, photographing
maps and plans for
distribution to staff officers.PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE WARAFTER
Though many Civil War negatives
were lost, the surviving images have
succeeded in becoming part of the
world’s photographic inheritance.THE PHOTOGRAPHERS
After the war, Mathew Brady, who had
invested $100,000 in cameras, wagons,
and equipment, went bankrupt, selling
many of his priceless negatives. Fortunately,
the Federal government purchased a set in- Alexander Gardner documented the
trials and executions of the Lincoln
assassination conspirators. Timothy O’Sullivan
became a noted photographer of the
American West.
HALFTONE PHOTOENGRAVING
The invention of halftone photoengraving
in the 1880s finally made it possible to
reproduce photographs in the pages of
books and periodicals. That made available to
people around the world the most significant
Civil War photographs.Mathew Brady
The most famous figure associated with Civil War
photography, Brady rarely operated a camera himself.
Instead he employed many of the conflict’s most
talented photographers.“What-is-it?” wagon
Mathew Brady is credited with introducing the
horse-drawn darkrooms that Union soldiers dubbed
“what-is-it?” wagons. According to one veteran, the
“novelty of its awkward mystery never quite wore off.”A photographic record
Published in 1866 and accompanied by explanatory text,
the 100 mounted photographs in Alexander Gardner’s
Photographic Sketchbook of the War came to define
how Americans envisioned the conflict.
of the battlefield dead. Gardner’s
depictions of mangled, bloated
Confederate bodies at Antietam, when
displayed in Brady’s New York gallery,
stunned the public. “Let him who
wishes to know what war is look at
this series of illustrations,” urged
Oliver Wendell Holmes. And the New
York Times noted, “If he has not
brought bodies and laid them in our
dooryards and along streets, he has
done something very like it.”Bringing the war home
Gardner and O’Sullivan, who together
made the “harvest of death” pictures
on the sodden, corpse-strewn fields of
Gettysburg, and Thomas Roche, who
photographed the Rebel dead littering
the Petersburg trenches, fed the
public’s increasing demand for realistic
images of the war. While photographs
printed as wood engravings were
appearing more often in the popular
magazines, stereo cards were also being
eagerly snapped up.
With one eye on their commercial
potential, photographers in the field
used stereoscopic cameras that
produced parallel negatives. Mounted
on cardboard, the resulting albumen
prints could be viewed through
a stereoscope, providing a good
simulation of three-dimensional
reality. Marketed through the E. & H.
T. Anthony Co. of New York, these
stereo cards were the principal means
by which the visual horrors of the war
were seen in American parlors.
Though the images offered only the
briefest glimpses of the carnage, this
did not lessen their impact on people“I had to go. A
spirit in my
feet said ‘Go,’
and I went.”
MATHEW BRADYwho had never seen anything like
it before—the dead on the fields of
Antietam and Gettysburg and the
corpses in the muddy trenches at
Spotsylvania and Petersburg.
And no one was the wiser if
photographers occasionally
manipulated a battlefield scene by
laying a rifle across a dead soldier
for added drama. The images would
have a lasting impact on the history
of photography. Alongside the
portraits of Abraham Lincoln, Robert
E. Lee, and other prominent figures in
the struggle, the images of the slain
would achieve a hallowed status in
American memory.