Six years after Roger Fenton's Crimean photographs, the United States went to war with itself, and cameras followed the armies. The pictures made between 1861 and 1865 are still among the most reproduced images of any war. This guide follows the account given by the US National Park Service at Antietam National Battlefield in Maryland, where, in September 1862, a battlefield was photographed before the dead had been buried.
Photography comes of age
The National Park Service traces photography back to the first image produced in 1839. In its account, photography began as a novelty and became a powerful medium of information and emotion, and photography and photojournalism came of age during the American Civil War. The park's history page goes further: no earlier conflict had been recorded in such detail.
The scale grew quickly. The Park Service writes that the work started with just a few photographers, but by 1865 dozens of them were hauling glass plates and volatile chemicals across the countryside. Because of their work, it says, people today can still look into the faces of soldiers and visit the places where events happened.
How a wet plate was made
The Park Service gives a clear account of the technology. The first known image was made by Louis Daguerre on polished silver plates in France. After about a decade of experiments with silver plates and paper, the Englishman Frederick Archer began working with glass plates. The glass negative was the critical breakthrough, because it allowed positive copies to be made on light-sensitised paper.
Keeping light-sensitive chemicals on glass was the problem Archer had to solve, and he solved it with collodion, a sticky transparent liquid. The photographer poured a puddle of collodion onto a glass or iron plate and tilted the plate until it was evenly coated. As the coating began to set, the plate went into the darkroom and was lowered into a bath of silver nitrate to make it light-sensitive.
The plate had to be sensitised just minutes before the exposure and developed before the coating dried, which is why the method is called "wet plate" photography. After the exposure, the photographer had to fix and wash the plate quickly, dry it over an alcohol lamp and varnish it for protection. In practice this meant a darkroom on wheels following the camera wherever it went.
Why there are no action pictures
The wet-plate process explains much of what Civil War photographs show and do not show. Preparing, exposing and developing each plate took minutes, so photographers recorded camps, portraits, places and the aftermath of battle rather than fighting itself. The Library of Congress gives the same reason, long exposure times, for the absence of action in Fenton's Crimean pictures.
Mathew Brady's studios
The Park Service connects photography's arrival in America to Samuel Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, who was in Europe and helped bring the new art to the United States. One of his students was Mathew Brady, who opened a photographic studio in New York City in 1844 and, in the Park Service's words, became almost as famous as the notable people who sat for him.
Brady's gallery at first used Daguerre's silver-plate process. Glass-plate photography reached the United States in 1856, and the Park Service says that no one perfected the process, or used it more effectively, than Brady's employee Alexander Gardner. When war threatened in the spring of 1861 and soldiers gathered in Washington, D.C., photographers followed, making camp scenes and portraits of new recruits. Gardner had just opened a studio in the capital for Brady. The park's page on Gardner's photographs describes Brady as the owner of a photography gallery in Washington during the war, and Gardner, then 41, as his employee.
Gardner at Antietam
In the Park Service's account, all of the early war photographs were taken in studios or tents, and no one had yet made images in the field. That changed in September 1862. Antietam, it says, was the first battle to show the grim and bloody truth of civil war, through the lens of Alexander Gardner and his assistant James Gibson.
Gardner made two trips. The first began two days after the battle. The second came when President Abraham Lincoln visited the battlefield; the park's photograph page says this was in early October, when Lincoln visited General George McClellan and the Army of the Potomac. Both of the park's pages state the same central fact: Antietam was the first American battlefield to be photographed before the dead had been buried.
Gardner also used a newer technique, the stereograph. A camera with two lenses captured two pictures at once, and when they were seen through a viewer the mind combined them into a three-dimensional image. The Park Service notes that stereo viewers and cards became the rage in American parlours, so the Antietam pictures entered private homes as well as public galleries.
How the pictures reached the public
A photograph could be made in the field, but in 1862 it could not be printed in a newspaper. The Park Service explains that newspapers could not reproduce photographs, so woodcuts based on the Antietam images were what spread across the country. The park shows one Gardner stereo view beside the woodcut made from it.
The original photographs went on display in New York City at Brady's gallery. The Park Service says New Yorkers were shocked and appalled, and it cites a review in The New York Times that credited Brady with bringing home to readers the terrible reality of war, as though the dead had been laid in their own front yards. The pictures were made by Gardner and Gibson and shown under Brady's name at his gallery, which is why credit for Civil War photographs is often more tangled than a single caption suggests.
A note on the numbers
The two National Park Service pages count Gardner's Antietam pictures differently. The park's history of photography says that of approximately ninety images Gardner took at Antietam, about seventy were stereo views. The park's gallery page says Gardner took 70 photographs of the battlefield starting two days after the battle. This reference reports both figures as the park gives them and does not choose between them. Readers who need an exact count should consult the original negatives and prints, which the park points to at the Library of Congress.
What changed
Set beside the Crimean record, the Antietam photographs mark a clear change. The Library of Congress explains that Victorian propriety kept the dead out of Fenton's pictures in 1855. Seven years later, Gardner's camera was on a battlefield before burial, and the results were exhibited to the public in New York. The technical limits were much the same: wet plates, long exposures and a darkroom wagon. What had changed was what a photographer, a gallery owner and an audience were prepared to look at.
The Civil War pictures also show how war images travel. A single exposure might exist as a glass negative, a stereo card in a parlour, a print on a gallery wall and a woodcut in a newspaper, each seen by a different audience and each slightly different from the others. That chain, from the photographer's plate to the public's eye, is the subject of the war photography guide.
Next: Reporting the world wars: censorship and accreditation