DEATH & DECEPTION
Photography: An Immediate Medium?
Photography tried to replace the diseased and distracted eye. Camera lenses branded themselves as objective and mechanical. Photography was understood as evidence and used as information. During the American Civil War, for example, Northern generals used photos to map Southern terrain. Newspapers reproduced photos of death, transporting the horror of war to people at home. Photos, though, involved layers of human intervention. In the two photos below, you can see the tents of The Herald and photography equipment. You can see the physical luggage and human labor required to produce this seemingly weightless piece of information.
“Group at tent and wagon of the New York Herald” (Culpeper, Virginia, ca. 1861–1865)
You can see the photographers’ equipment in the far right of the image. “Torpedo Station, Quarters” (James River, Virginia, ca. 1861–1865)
Below you will find photographs that are partially drawn. In the 1860s, photos couldn’t be directly printed. Instead, a person (often a woman, often uncredited for her artisanal labor) would carefully draw over the photograph, reproducing it in a series of small dots. That artistic copy—the half-tone—is what people saw in the pages of the news.
Human craft and effort intervene in this “mechanical” seeing. How immediate, then, can this medium be?
The soldiers in the boat have been partially drawn over. “Blanket boats ferrying soldiers across the Potomac River” (Alexandria, Virginia, ca. 1861–1865)
The figures in the foreground of this image have been partially drawn over. “Barricades” (Alexandria, Virginia, ca. 1861–1865)
Competition with the Engraving
Which is more exciting, a photo or an engraving? While the photo wins with immediacy, the engraving wins with action. In the 1860s, a camera could capture only still shots of “before” and “after” scenes. An engraving, by contrast, could depict bodies in motion.
This section focuses on the Northern media’s imagery of themselves as righteous victors, and of the South as receiving deserved punishment. Do you think the photograph, or the engraving, offers a more compelling way to create this visual narrative? Below is an example of “before” and “after” scenes: a two-hundred-pound gun, then a bomb hole in a wall in Charleston, South Carolina. A viewer is left to imagine the action.
The “before” scene: a 200-pound gun used for shelling Charleston, South Carolina (Morris Island, South Carolina, ca. 1861–1865)
The “after” scene: a bomb hole in Hibernian Hall (Charleston, South Carolina, ca. 1861-1865)
By contrast, Thomas Nast’s engraving The War in the Border States
imagines smoke billowing, snow falling, men shivering, children running, and women wailing.
“The War in the Border States” from the Jan. 17, 1863 issue of Harper’s Weekly.
Photographer Mathew Brady staged this shot of a dead Confederate soldier (ca. 1861–1865)
Photography had to argue for itself as the most immediate medium. So, photographers such as Mathew Brady physically manipulated their images to create a feeling of dynamism. At right you’ll see a photo of a dead soldier crumpled in the mud. Brady rearranged this body, then added the gun, to increase the drama of the image. This kind of manipulation, a precursor to today’s photo editing, was common in the 1860s.
Photography is inseparable from artifice and artistry.
“These Weird Copies of Carnage”
Stereograph image of Union Army dead on the field of battle (Pennsylvania, Gettysburg, July 1, 1863)
“The living that throng Broadway care little perhaps for the Dead at Antietam, but we fancy they would jostle less carelessly…were a few dripping bodies, fresh from the field, laid along the pavement.” So begins a New York Times review (below left) of Mathew Brady’s photography gallery (pictured below right, ironically, in an engraving). The New York Times columnist suggests that a photograph of a dead body is the same as putting the action of the battlefront onto the streets of New York City. Brady has, essentially, left dripping bodies, fresh from the field, on the street.
Commentary on Brady’s photography
Mathew Brady’s photograph studio and gallery in New York City (ca. 1862)
“Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it.”…
“You will see hushed, reverent groups standing around these weird copies of carnage, bending down to look in the pale faces of the dead, chained by the strange spell that dwells in the dead men’s eyes.”
These sensational photographs were available for purchase, seventy-five cents each, as shown on the pricing card below. This inventory of Mathew Brady’s Civil War photographs for sale appears on the backside of the photograph of the chair in which Lincoln was assassinated. This photo is included in the next section.
Sensation earns its keep: feeling is profitable.
An inventory of Civil War photographs available for purchase for seventy-five cents each.
A Terrible Crime! Lincoln Shot!
We start in the theater, in the drama of the engraving. Door thrown open, John Wilkes Booth rushes onto center stage. His body is strained. He’s about to pull the trigger.
“Assassination of Abraham Lincoln” (Ford’s Theatre, April 14, 1865)
In the next engraving, he is blurred in the rapid escape, the horse’s hooves flying over the cobblestones.
“John Wilkes Booth escaping on horseback from the rear of Ford's Theater after assassinating Abraham Lincoln” (1865)
These two images that follow seem to be photographs. But are they? They have the same stillness, but they are not, in fact, photographs. The death bed scene is a lithograph of a painting. The funeral car image is also a lithograph—a reproduction of a photograph.
“Death-Bed of Lincoln” (April, 14, 1865)
“The funeral car that conveyed the remains of Abraham Lincoln from the Executive Mansion to the Capitol” (April, 19, 1865)
The rocking chair below is a photograph of absence. At the sight of the empty chair, the viewer is left to imagine the heft of Lincoln’s warm body and the sudden motion of the bullet.
What urgency, what solemnity, do these media call up in your body? What feeling do these different kinds of artistic storytelling permit or deny?
“Chair occupied by Abraham Lincoln during his assassination” (Ford's Theatre, April, 14, 1865)