CAPTURING SOLDIERS: How photography influenced the Civil War (and vice versa)

BY ADAM PARKER

In the 1850s, as the new medium of photography found its footing in the commercial marketplace, the way people perceived their world and one another changed dramatically.

And when P.G.T. Beauregard’s forces fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor on April 12, 1861, signaling the start of America’s most devastating war, photographers were ready to capitalize on the occasion.

To be sure, their work served to document the Civil War, but that was hardly its only — or main — purpose. The impact these images had on perceptions of the war and the behavior of soldiers and civilians alike was enormous.

A remarkable new exhibition, “Photography and the American Civil War,” which arrives at the Gibbes Museum September 27, seeks to explore “the role of the camera at a watershed moment in American culture.”

Organized by Jeff L. Rosenheim, curator in charge in the Department of Photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the show has garnered extensive attention and praise during its residency in New York City. It will occupy both second-floor exhibit galleries at the Gibbes until January 5, then head to the New Orleans Museum of Art for its last viewing.

“I’m very excited for it to be seen in another environment, one that has its own wonderful, complex history,” Rosenheim said in a telephone interview. “I think these pictures will come to life in Charleston.”

It will provide a rare opportunity to consider how art influenced the war, and how the war influenced art.

The human condition

Rosenheim conceived of the show more than 10 years ago, and spent the last five years intensely preparing it, he said.

“I worked years on this thing,” he said. “At end you make an exhibition, and the pictures take on new meaning when they are on the wall and associated with each other.” They demonstrate the photographic memory and cultural memory are inextricably intertwined.

“Photography and the American Civil War” consists of many objects — framed photos, large-format books, jewelry and mementos and other portable items that contained a tintype image. In this sense, Rosenheim said, the show has real weight.

It also establishes a common language with which the war could be understood, despite political and geographic differences, he said. The pictures include battlefield and field hospital scenes, landscapes and numerous portraits.

“What you see in the faces of these kids, very young, what you see in the faces of these soldiers, whether they’re from Virginia or Maine, is the belief that if they sit for their portrait they will survive the war.”

The pictures are visually simple, without much variation of pose or perspective, Rosenheim said.

“What’s not simple about them is how effectively they communicate. They’re not heroic, they’re anti-heroic.” And they offer “unvarnished insight into the human condition.”

That condition included all the profound courage, all the terror, all the ambivalence and devastating sorrow that accompanies unspeakable violence.

“Soldiers north and south were fighting for something they believed in,” Rosenheim said. “When they sat for their portrait they believed in it, too.” They believed that they were being immortalized. They believed in the supernatural force of art, the way it connects people and keeps them connected without regard for epoch. “We are so much more jaded today.”

The use of photography

Two years ago, Gibbes director Angela Mack received a call from her colleague Carrie Barrett, associate director of collections and administration at the Metropolitan Museum. The two women had worked together before, lending objects back and forth and generating research on Southern American art.

Barrett and Rosenheim were looking for a partner in the South to host the Civil War exhibition, and the Gibbes was an obvious choice.

Mack emphasized the thrust of the presentation: “(Rosenheim) didn’t want it to be a historic show about the Civil War,” she said. “It’s a photography show. It shines a light on the medium and how it affected the war ... and public perception of a crisis.”

Gibbes Curator of Exhibitions Pam Wall noted that these are not the sort of war photographs we have become accustomed to. There are no action shots because the equipment was cumbersome and the exposure process long.

“So (photographers) came after a battle but before the bodies were moved,” she said.

It is possible that some scenes were deliberately staged or otherwise manipulated for effect. Photojournalistic ethics had not yet been developed.

“Photographers were taking advantage of the situation,” Mack said.

Many of the numerous photographers working at the time set up portable studios in order to capitalize on the war, offering to produce portraits of soldiers soon to become embroiled in the violence, Wall said. Getting these men to pay for a portrait often was not difficult: You better do this,” they were told, in case you don’t come home. At least your family will have something to remember you by.

And some photographers were hired to create partisan images designed to make the war look better or worse, depending on who the commissioner was, Wall said.

For example, George Barnard followed Sherman’s March to the Sea and created a large album of images he called “Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign, produced with the general’s support. He began in Nashville and documented the destruction in Atlanta, Savannah, Columbia and Charleston.

“They saw value in preserving their accomplishments,” Mack said. “It is clear that these guys understood the significance of the event. They understood that we were fighting for what we were going to become. So there was a lot of documentation.”

Rosenheim said the camera was often used as a tool for political activism or strategic planning, not only as a documentary device.

The 1863 photograph of a Louisiana slave whose back was covered with the scars of multiple whippings was produced for the explicit purpose of lending weight to the abolitionist movement up north, he said.

“Hundreds of thousands of portraits of survived,” Rosenheim said. “We believe something like a million pictures were made in those four years,” taken by 2,000 identified photographers. “That’s a lot. It touched everybody.”

A war like no other

“This is the first of America’s wars that’s visually publicized,” said Bernard Powers, a history professor at the College of Charleston. “This is very important because it added immediacy to conflict that Americans had never experienced before. (The images) gave us a better sense of the horrors of the conflict and the thorough-going destructiveness. And this raised the stakes, I think. It says to some, ‘We’ve got to commit ourselves’ — political leaders, soldiers — ‘to this conflict because we are so invested. Look at what we have lost. We’ve got to see it through.’”

At the same time, these startling images fueled the peace movement in the north, Powers said. Some northern Democrats who sympathized with the South, the Copperheads, argued that the carnage was insupportable.

And after the issuance of the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, others reacted to the images by asking whether fighting a war to free black people was worth it, Powers added. Why not negotiate a settlement?

“From the vantage point of the individual soldier, this war was really like no other because of the volume of death, the massiveness of death, and in some cases the completeness of death. The instruments of war were more powerful and accurate. So soldiers who are killed, are completely obliterated” or buried in mass graves, or left to rot in the blood-stained fields. “There was nothing left to really mourn, except the photographs.”

The inhumanity of the carnage was underscored by photography, Powers said.

“Those who’ve studied this have told us about soldiers, who had their wits about them in the final moment, found in death clutching the photograph. The photograph takes the place of what would have been a more normal mourning situation and deathbed situation.”

Too often, death came in extraordinary ways and made extraordinary claims on the living. The grieving process was elongated, the emotional scars larger, the sense of dislocation profound.

“That can help us understand where we are today, in 2013, when we think of the homage that’s continued to be paid to the Confederacy,” Powers said. “We cannot disengage ourselves today, in 2013, from the way that death occurred during that four-year period.”

And the effect of the war, brought home through photographic images, had a lasting effect on the living. In Charleston after the war, all the women who could afford it would dress in mourning apparel, recognizing one another in the streets.

“This creates a new sorority of sorts, a sorority of sorrow that no one would have wanted to be a member of,” Powers said.

Nothing like it would happen again for a hundred years. In the 1960s as the Vietnam War began to rage with its unique fury, photography once again would insert itself into the making of history, he said.

The images seen on television every night “brought a certain kind of immediacy to the conflict that we hadn’t seen before.” And that immediacy — those images of cataclysmic violence — changed public opinion.

Holding on

Photography already was becoming an important new visual medium, but its speedy and significant entrance into mainstream American culture happened thanks to the war, Rosenheim said.

“It really needed a great subject.”

The war made the camera a cornerstone of private and institutional life, and itinerant photographers took full advantage of this change.

“It’s surprising to me was how thorough the camera integrated itself into the lives of many in the north and south, not just officers but also enlisted men, often having pictures made for the first time,” Rosenheim said. “What that meant to them must have been unbelievable.”

The photographs were worn on lapels, placed in broaches, carried in pockets, arranged in albums. In this way their subjects gained a certain immortality.

“If they survived that first battle, they sat for another picture,” Rosenheim said.

And memory itself — the manner in which people thought about the war — was at least partly influenced by this large photographic body of work.

Technological advancement made it all possible. The collodion “wet plate” process, which required portable darkrooms, gave way to the extensive use of dry plates, typically glass (ambrotype) or a sheet of metal (tintype) on which a dry light-sensitive emulsion was applied.

These new plates could be pre-coated and processed quickly, and tintypes were much cheaper than anything that had come before them.

The way people collected these objects, thought about them and formed emotional attachments to them is fascinating, Rosenheim said.

“The currency of pictures was just different,” he said. “Pictures were made, consumed, used by soldiers, officers, abolitionists, family, to hold on to something they knew could be lost so easily, and often was.”

The exhibit not only provides an opportunity to contemplate history, the significance of the Civil War and the meaning of art, it also raises important questions about our current era, Rosenheim said.

“What is the role of the camera in society today? What do we ask of our photographers today? What do we ask ourselves as consumers of images today?” 
In the age of the JPEG and MPEG, of social media, file sharing and remote digital storage, answering these questions could shed some light on who we are and how we choose to live.