28/5/13 – Metropolitan Museum of Art – Photography and the American Civil War Exhibition

When you view the opening photo of this post I invite you to think about what message this picture communicates to you? Was it taken before or after the war? And who is the man in the shot?

I had not realised it but photography was only a recent invention, starting with the work of Thomas Wedgwood (1790) and culminating with the final steps made by the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1826) when the American Civil War broke out in April 1861. This powerful medium had only not even reached the US until 1839 and its use and availability during the war changed the people’s perception of war and made it impossible to romanticise it.

As Alexander Gardner, one of the leading photographers of the war subsequently noted, photography at that time was limited and couldn't capture action well, but it was ‘spectacular at revealing the dead’. Photographers like Gardner largely captured the images of this war without reflection or consideration. And as I wandered through the display, I pondered whether these photos were art or journalism.

Can these images of brother against brother convey anything but the truth about the war? The famous letters from Bob Taggart to his brother (1861-1864) reveal that he thought 'no tongue can tell, no mind conceive, no pen portray the horrible sights’ that he had seen in the course of his active participation in the war. But clearly Bob had not considered the power of the camera!

According to the exhibition curator Jeff Rosenheim, and historian Harold Holzer, the photos on display, taken in the midst of this most bloody of wars by great photographers like Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, Timothy O'Sullivan and George Barnard, amount to something much more than just a collection of images.

These photos did not just document the war, they united the country in an act of collective memory making and, perhaps unintentionally, in showing the brutal facts of wartime life, they also created a national archive of what American society and life was really like at that point in time. Furthermore, by capturing images of both the young and the old, the mighty and the humble, men and women, poor and wealthy, free and slave, all engaged in a mighty and history changing struggle, they set in motion a legacy of the war that was led, inevitably, to the eventual emancipation of all slaves. 

We saw photos of women fighting dressed as men and photos of Sojourner Truth, a feminist and former slave who attempted to use photography to control her destiny through ‘selling the shadow to sell the substance’. At a human-rights convention, Sojourner Truth commented that she “used to be sold for other people’s benefit, but now she sold (images of) herself for her own.”

There was also the famous photo of the scourged slave Gordon who ran away to a Union army camp where his grotesquely scarred back was photographed and the resulting images published to aid the cause of emancipation. Even today those images are horrifying. Back then their effect on the great majority of the people of the North, who knew nothing of the day to day brutality of the system of slavery, cannot be overstated. On seeing such shocking images, who could not want freedom for the abused and scarred slaves of the south?

Just as television was used by President Kennedy to sell himself to the people in the 1960s, so too was photography used in the Presidential election of 1860 in order to promote Abraham Lincoln. Leading into the election it was widely rumoured that Lincoln was ugly and malformed and, on the basis that an ‘ugly face reflects an ugly soul’, many people were unwilling to vote for him. But fortunately for posterity a photograph taken by Mathew Brady and reproduced on a widely distributed Lincoln supporters’ button during the Republican Convention turned around his reputation for being unattractive and he was eventually selected as the GOP’s presidential candidate after the 3rd ballot.

It is worth noting that, until just before the Convention, Lincoln had always been clean shaven but his ‘spin doctors’ convinced him to grow a beard to cover his gaunt face before he appeared at the Convention. He subsequently joked that it was not so much his famous Convention speech at the Cooper Union in February 1860 that made him President, but rather the photo that Mathew Brady took!

But photos not only moved people to vote for Lincoln, they also moved people to remember the war. Timothy H. O'Sullivan’s ‘A Harvest of Death’ taken at the Battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania captured the moment when the people of that town buried the hundreds of dead with dignity and thereby created the first military soldiers cemetery.

Since that time, as Peter and I can attest from our visits to places like the Somme, Omaha beach and the Cambridge American Cemetery, the United State has always done an impressive job of marking the final resting places of its war dead with due recognition and in well-tended graves, no matter where these may be situated.

As one of the major photos in the exhibition clearly shows, Lincoln visited the Gettysburg battlefield just days after the battle had ended. The experience moved him to write what became his greatest and most famous speech. The Gettysburg Address consists of only 271 words, but what powerful words they are. It was delivered on the afternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, some four and a half months after the end of that famous and bloody battle. Lincoln’s concise and carefully crafted address, although it was intended to be secondary to other presentations on the day, has subsequently come to be regarded as one of the greatest speeches in American history.

Beginning with the now-iconic phrase "Four score and seven years ago," (referring to the Declaration of Independence, written at the start of the American Revolution in 1776) the speech examined the founding principles of the United States and considered how those principles applied in the context of the Civil War and, for the first time, expressly proclaimed the Civil War to be a struggle not just for the preservation of the Union but also, and much more importantly, for “a new birth of freedom” that would bring true equality to all US citizens.

The speech memorialized the sacrifices of those who had given their lives at Gettysburg and concluded by asserting the absolute need to ensure that the sacrifices of the fallen had not been in vain and that, as they had hoped: “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

 

Another thing I learned from this exhibition, that I did not know previously, was the context in which the decision to allow ‘blacks’ to serve as front line troops in the US army was reached. In July 1862, the Union army was in disarray and Robert E Lee’s Confederates were clearly on top.  So, in order to mobilise more manpower for the fight, Lincoln reversed his previous policy not to allow ‘blacks’ into active service and thereafter 186,000 of them enlisted and served in separate ‘blacks only’ Divisions on the side of the Union. (It is worth noting here that racial segregation in the US Army only ended in 1948 after the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights was announced.)

Lincoln's famous Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863 also caused controversy since those who had been slave owners were not to be compensated for what they saw as the effective ‘confiscation of private property’. Photos of freed slaves were being used for publicity. The photos were sold to raise funds for the education of newly freed slaves. One of the most famous of these photos showed a proud black man staring straight at the camera with the initials of his former sugar planter ‘owner’ clearly branded across his forehead. Many with their hearts (and money invested) in the South were outraged by such photos.

Photographers on the battlefields used the magic of the camera to preserve lost sons and husbands on cards and in lockets. They conveyed hope and the possible magic of photography to bring their loved ones back. And they made a small fortune in the process. Photography went from a luxury item to a necessity and the law of supply and demand saw costs plummet.

The axiom ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ was never truer than here as the industry that began with one of a kind ink on glass portraits with no negatives evolved into a big business with multiple copies of photographic  portraits being sent and received on the battlefield. The economic incentive of wartime demand also led to the development of the first version of 3D photography (the so called ‘stereograph’ that could only be viewed through a patented ‘stereopticon’). These 3D images were immensely popular (and profitable) as they created a sense of really ‘being there’.

 

Photography also entered into the realm of ethics and medicine. The last great battle of the Civil War was the siege of Petersburg, Virginia—a brutal campaign that led to Confederate General Robert E. Lee's surrender on April 9, 1865. Samuel Shoop, a twenty-five-year-old private in Company F of the 200th Pennsylvania Volunteers, received a gunshot wound in the thigh at Fort Steadman, Virginia, on the first day of the campaign (March 25) and was evacuated to Harewood U.S. Army Hospital in Washington, D.C. His leg was amputated by Dr. Bontecou, surgeon in charge, who also made a series of clinical photographs, one of which is reproduced here, to serve as a tool for teaching fellow army surgeons.

This extremely rare example of the early professional medical use of photography in America is another aspect of the extensive photographic documentation of the Civil War. Dr Bontecou continued to use the 570 photos to teach medicine in Washington for many years after the war had ended as debate raged over issues to do with the need to balance science and clinical education against the preservation of the dignity and humanity of patients.

Photographs were also used to bring to justice those who had committed war crimes. Commander Heinrich Hartmann Wirz, a Swiss-born Confederate officer in the American Civil War, was in charge of Camp Sumter, the Confederate prisoner of war camp near Andersonville, Georgia. In 1864, AJ Riddle photographed ‘Andersonville Prison’ where there was no cover, no medical facilities and no food for the 45,000 inmates. Some 13,000 union prisoners died there and Wirz was charged with war crimes, tried and executed after the surrender of the South for conspiracy and murder relating to his command of the camp.

Photography was also used for spying and George Barnard’s ‘Quaker Gun’ is a classic example and we saw how Robert E Lee’s fake tree cannons had delayed the battle of Bull Run. Interestingly after the war, and just a few days before he was assassinated, Lincoln was given a photographic portrait of General Lee that had been taken at the official surrender ceremony. Lincoln had never seen or met Lee but he commented to his son, who had procured the photo for him, that ‘it looks a kindly face’ and expressed the wish that Lee might live out his days in peace.

It is a cruel irony, in the face of such magnanimity, that in just a few days Lincoln himself would be violently shot and killed but, in an eerie foretaste of the modern day loss of privacy which all public figures now have to endure, photography was present for that sad event as well. The melee after the assassination of was captured with photographs. The assassination occurred on Good Friday and the funeral was on Easter Sunday which was also, coincidentally, the end of Passover. So Lincoln was immediately seen by a grieving nation as some sort of modern day amalgam of both Jesus and Moses.

His funeral procession in NYC is still the largest public event ever to take place in the US. It extended from the docks down Broadway to City Hall. Photography that had captured the transcendent highs of the Union victory now also captured and the lows of Lincoln’s death and funeral. Photographs of Booth and his co-conspirators were everywhere while they were on the run and, after they were captured tried, convicted and sentenced to be hung, photographs of the actual hanging, taken by Mathew Brady, the only photographer permitted at the execution, were widely distributed.
 

I was emotionally drained at the end of this exhibition but I greatly appreciated the work and vision of Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner, Timothy O'Sullivan and George Barnard and their use of the latest technology of their time to capture an image and use it to convey a truth. Well done to these few men who used their pictures not to convey a thousand words but a thousand lives. How powerful their images are. They will remain with me forever.

The opening photo is Mathew Brady viewing the wheat field in which General Reynolds was shot Gettysburg 1863. Americans were shocked. It was their war held on their land, with their sons and everywhere there was anguish, loss and dread. This was no longer Eden but a place drenched in the blood of brothers.