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Alexander Gardner, Timothy H. O’Sullivan, George N.
Barnard): camp scenes, army group portraits, but also
the fi rst “straight” photographs ever of war casualties
and destruction, among which the most famous one is
probably O’Sullivan’s “A Harvest of Death,” a view
of Union soldier corpses left lying at the battlefi eld of
Gettysburg. Here were, to quote Gardner’s words in
his Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War (1865),
the “dreadful details” and the “blank horror” of war:
these pictures indeed clashed with the traditionally
staid pictorial representation of war, and inaugurated a
tradition of war reportage, and of reportage in general,
that would be durable and especially strong in American
photography. The unique photographic documentation
of the war that was thus collected—mostly, once again,
from the Union side—has become a major document
of American history. Along with various technical
uses of photography for map-making, reproduction
and fi ling that the military itself promoted, it has often
been cited as one of the illustrations of the Civil War’s
“modern” dimension. But there were other aspects
as well, although often overlooked. First, the war af-
fected virtually every American family, and it tragically
strengthened the desire of relatives to remain linked to
their boys by getting their pictures, and of soldiers to
keep a remembrance of home, peace and family ties
through the carte-de-visite portraits of loved ones they
kept in their wallets. The production of photographic
portraits during the war was enormous, and it was one
of the immediate reasons why the armies—especially
on the Union side—decided to allow and then to invite
photographers among their ranks. Although from its
inception photography had been especially linked with
the keeping of family portraits and especially the com-
memoration of the dead, the Civil War more than any
other single event made photographic portraits a part
of American life. And it was after the Civil War that
increasing numbers of ordinary American citizens,
including a large number of women (who have more
recently been brought to our attention), took up pho-
tography either as a business or as a hobby. Second,
the Union Army’s involvement with photography and
photographers precipitated, in the wake of the war, its
inclusion in virtually every sector of scientifi c, museal,
documentary and more generally institutional activity
in the U.S. It was after the war, and often as a direct
result of Army staff connections with photographers,
that many new or preexisting institutions started to use
photography and to hire photographers on a more or
less permanent basis. This was true with a number of
medical, police, and other public institutions. But the
most striking example of this phenomenon was the wide-
spread use of photography and photographers in Federal
surveys of the West between 1867 and 1880, which
involved several veterans of war photography, such as
O’Sullivan—who remained in Federal hire from 1867 to
his death in 1881, and who is now the most valued and
scrutinized of the survey photographers—and Andrew
J. Russell, who after serving with the Quartermaster
Corps went on to document the building of the Union
Pacifi c Railroad line. Along with the spirit of conquest
and colonization that characterized the post-war years,
the Army’s involvement with photographers thus paved
the way, somewhat paradoxically perhaps, for the ex-
ceptional fl ourishing of documentary and landscape
photography that took place in the West, under Federal
direction mostly, around 1870. Beyond O’Sullivan, the
survey photographers included, among others, William
H. Jackson, another “grand old man” of American pho-
tography who recorded the fi rst views of Yellowstone,
the Mountain of the Holy Cross, Mesa Verde and many
another of the “wonders of the West,” and Jack Hillers,
the photographer on Major John Wesley Powell’s survey
of the Colorado who almost singlehandedly created
the photographic archive of Indians in the Bureau of
American Ethnology. When looking at the sublime
landscapes of California, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho,
etc., which were taken by these photographers in large,
sometimes gigantic, collodion-coated glass-plates, one
cannot but be struck at their magnitude as well as techni-
cal and artistic excellence. At the same time, however,
one cannot either avoid the supposition that the Federal
Government, by 1870, had found in the photography of
the West’s grand landscapes a perfect visual and even
artistic expression for its policy of “reconstruction,” i.e.,
a means of replacing the wounds of the war with visions
of both a pristine Nature and a grandiose future in the
imagination of Americans.
Many of these photographs, including especially
hundreds of landscape pictures that basically defi ned the
contours of the American imagination of the West and
its great sites, were exhibited and rewarded in several
important exhibitions, including the World Fairs of Paris
in 1867 and Vienna in 1873, as well as the Centennial
Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. They were also
distributed, along with many other similar pictures of
private or corporate origin, in the form of stereoviews,
which by 1870 had become the most important popular
medium of visual information and entertainment. The
railroad companies were especially active in promoting
and selling landscape photography. The business of
landscape views was between 1865 and 1890—aside
from portraits—the primary channel of popularization
of photography and photographs in American society,
and it continually reemphasized the connection between
the new medium—for photography was still considered
such by the general public—and the new perspectives
of American society. But it also served, although some-
what paradoxically, the recognition of photography as
an art form. Because these views obsessively staged