1469
election with these fi ne portraits of the President. Brady
claimed he was called to the war, “I felt I had to go. A
spirit in my feet said ‘go,’ and I went.”
Although suffering from poor eyesight, Brady ini-
tially went to the fi elds and was greeted with distaste
from many of the soldiers who suspiciously saw his cam-
era as some kind of weapon. Later, he organized other
photographers to do most of the actual photographing.
However, Brady managed to frequently place himself
within photographs of military heroes. Throughout the
course of the war, Brady hired over twenty photogra-
phers to shoot the troops, battle scenes, and the bodies
after the massacres. He organized a complex system of
equipping each of the photographers with a portable
dark room and stocked chemicals and glass plates at the
major battlefi elds. His team of photographers produced
over 7000 negatives during the war.
One of Brady’s best photographers was Alexander
Gardner. Gardner followed the Army of the Potomac
and captured most of their battles. His fi rst war photo-
graphs were exhibited in Brady’s studio in September
of 1862 and captured the horrifi c results of the Battle
of Antietam, the bloodiest battle of the war in which
26,000 soldiers were killed or wounded. The gallery
received huge crowds desperate to see these fi rst im-
ages portraying with veracity the costs of war. These
photographs were dramatically realistic in contrast to
heroic scenes that had been done of dead soldiers by
painters in this period. Gardner showed the actual decay
of the corpses and the inhumanity of their deaths. Eight
of these photographs were also published in Harper’s
Weekly on October 18, 1862.
The New York Times praised the show, “Mr. Brady
has done something to bring home to us the terrible real-
ity and earnestness of war” and Gardner was disturbed
by Brady’s assumed ownership of these photographs.
Each photograph was boldly marked with “Brady’s Al-
bum Gallery” in contrast to Gardner’s name written in
small barely noticeable print. Gardner reacted by taking
the negatives of his photographs along with Timothy
O’Sullivan and James F. Gibson, some of Brady’s
best photographers, and opened his own studio. Once
working for himself, some of Gardner’s most intriguing
works were those from his series on the execution of
the conspirators who plotted the murder of President
Lincoln.
Gardner clearly credited the photographers who
worked for him in the publication of their work. For ex-
ample, Timothy O’Sullivan, while working for Gardner,
produced arguably the most famous war photograph,
the “Harvest of Death” taken of the battlefi eld of Get-
tysburg. This scene shows a fi eld covered with bodies,
highlighting the numerous deaths from this battle.
Yet O’Sullivan simultaneously shows the viewer one
soldier’s face, his contorted hand in the center of the
photo, bringing a large inconceivable number down to
the reality of many individuals. Other soldiers have their
clothes partly removed as thieves have already been
searching their bodies. The scene achieves the kind of
accurate reportage which Gardner supported when he
remarked that this photograph by O’Sullivan “conveys
a useful moral: it shows the blank horror and reality of
war, in opposition to the pageantry.”
Photography also fi lled a unique role for families
who sent their loved ones to battle. Portraits of soldiers
were often taken before leaving for the war and make-
shift studios were set up in many battlefi elds enabling
soldiers to send home images of themselves. The re-
cently developed and inexpensive tintype photographs
were particularly popular. It should be highlighted
that although a few photographs of African-American
troops and the treatment of slaves were taken, the pho-
tographic record of this period for African-Americans
is minimal in comparison to the copious photographs
taken of the war.
Some of the many photographers not discussed in
depth in this essay who photographed scenes from
The Civil War include: George Barnard, Bergstresser
Brothers, Sam Cooley, James Gardner, James Gibson,
S.A. Holmes, David Knox, Theodore Lilienthal, Royan
Linn, A.D. Lytle, William Pywell, James Reekie, George
Rockwood, T.C. Roche, John Scholten, William Mor-
ris Smith, Julian Vannerson, David Woodbury, and J.
A. Young. Andrew J. Russell is the only photographer
during the Civil War to have been paid by the govern-
ment.
After the war, photographs of the battlefi elds were
diffi cult to sell as the public preferred to forget their
tragic losses. Alexander Gardner’s Photographic
Sketch Book of the Civil War published after the Civil
War, which included O’Sullivan’s famous Harvest of
Death, had little response. While many photographers
struggled, perhaps none suffered more than Brady who
had bankrupted himself from his investments to photo-
graph the war and ended up destitute and mostly blind.
Also after the end of the war, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated
Newspaper published images of Southern war camps
and malnourished prisoners. Mary Warner Marien dis-
cusses the role of the North’s blockade of the South as
a cause for the extreme neglect of the prisoners of the
Confederacy.The 1870s and 1880s
During the 1870s and 1880s numerous regional wars
took place throughout the globe. However, few photog-
raphers recorded these events, as there was little interest
in them for purposes of print illustrations. Rather, most
newspapers hired artists to sketch dramatic battle scenes
believing photography lacked the ability to capture the