War Photography Accepted as a Legitimate Art Form in the Nineteenth Century

Seeing is believing: early war photography

Roger Fenton, Hardships in the Camp, 1855. Image courtesy of George Eastman Business firm www.eastmanhouse.org

When information technology comes to mod warfare, we've seen so much through photographs: mass graves, explosions, the faces of soldiers the instant they're shot. And we've also seen the aftermath of war–devastated landscapes, soldiers carrying their dead, and returning abode to their families. We've become accustomed to a depth of visual coverage that has brought deep familiarity with the realities of war from start to cease, a stark contrast to the feel of civilian audiences prior to the advent of photography. Photographs from three wars fought within an eighteen year period–the Mexican-American War, the Crimean War, and the American Civil State of war–illustrate the changes in photographic techniques, coverage, and distribution that would eventually develop into the prolific (and explicit) creation and distribution of war imagery nosotros run into today.

Unknown photographer, Full general Wool and staff in the Calle Real, Saltillo, Mexico, ca. 1847. Prototype courtesy of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art world wide web.cartermuseum.org/collection

Unknown photographer, Burial site of Lieutenant Colonel Henry Clay, Jr., ca. 1847. Epitome courtesy of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art world wide web.cartermuseum.org/drove

The starting time photographs of war were fabricated in 1847, when an unknown American photographer produced a serial of 50 daguerreotypes depicting scenes from the Mexican-American war in Saltillo, United mexican states. These images covered a range of subjects, from portraits of generals and infantrymen to landscapes, street scenes, and mail service-battle burial grounds. While the images provide insight into daily life on the periphery of the war, they are especially notable for what they do not depict: in them, we see neither active battles or wounded and dead bodies, nor the idealization and celebrity sometimes associated with state of war.

Nathaniel Currier, Expiry of Major Ringgold, 1846. Photograph © The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

In The Emergence of Modern State of war Imagery in Early Photography, Bernd Hüppauf writes "It can be argued that afterward hundreds of years of battle painting which, with few exceptions, was devoted to heroic images of war, it was the 'democratization of images' through photography from the mid-nineteenth century onward that exposed the moral question of war equally one of pictorial representation." The anonymous lensman's stylistic choices would have been determined by personal safety and technological limitations of the time. Daguerreotypes were laborious to produce, endangering the photographer in battles, and exposure times ranging from several seconds to many minutes rendered moving subjects every bit mere blurs. However, the lack of action or heroism constitute in these anonymous photographs represented a departure from tropes of war imagery that would redefine war as seen by the public. Until the eye of the camera was turned on war, prints, drawings, and paintings fulfilled the demand to document such happenings, generally representing them as action-oriented, make clean, and heroic undertakings, as seen in the example of the in a higher place Currier & Ives print depicting the impossibly pristine expiry of Major Ringgold during the Battle of Palo Alto. Piffling attention was given to the realities of expiry or soldier experiences between battles.

It should be noted that the daguerreotype process had one more limitation that makes these images rather unique within the history of war photography: produced using polished silver-coated copper sheets exposed with mercury vapors, the process yielded a single, mirror-like positive image which could not exist reproduced. Modest and encased in glass for protection of their delicate, mirror-like surface, daguerreotypes were precious objects rather than devices that could efficiently distribute information to the masses. The first attempt to photograph a war was not necessarily done with journalistic intentions–though this would change in future conflicts.

When the Crimean state of war began six years later in 1853, photography'south usefulness as a means of documenting, sharing, and digesting 'factual' knowledge of historic events was widely acknowledged. Harnessing the power of the realism perceived in photography to shape public stance, the British government sought to document the war every bit a means of uniting the public behind their increasingly unpopular war efforts. 4 official photographers were dispatched at different points in the conflict, although the fruits of their efforts were lost–many before even making it into public distribution.

Roger Fenton, Valley of the Shadow of Death, April 23, 1855. Image and original data provided by The J. Paul Getty Museum www.getty.edu

The Crimean state of war wasn't successfully documented until publisher William Agnew saw an opportunity to sell photographs of the conflict to a concerned public and hired Roger Fenton to document the war. Over the course of 4 months Fenton created 360 drinking glass plate negatives of battlefield landscapes, staged group portraits of British, French, and Turkish soldiers and their lives in the camps, and generals mounted on horseback, working under the protection of the British government. Much like the images captured by the anonymous photographer documenting the Mexican-American war, at that place is a notable absence of death and tempering of suffering in much of Fenton'south work.The Valley of the Shadow of Death, i of Fenton's best-known images from the disharmonize, indirectly portrays the horrors experienced by troops undergoing heavy fire via a road covered heavily with cannonballs. It is widely accepted that Fenton staged this photo, moving additional cannonballs into the route to emphasize the horrific battery experienced past troops marching the road days earlier, rather than documenting casualties of the assail. Nosotros don't know why Fenton avoided documenting the grisly scenes he likely encountered, opting instead to allude to them through carefully crafted visual symbolism.

Ultimately, sales of Fenton's body of work weren't as successful equally Agnew expected. In his descriptive background for the Library of Congress'due south Fenton collection, cataloger Woody Woodis posits that "the bright, though understated, reality of state of war presented in the photographs may take led to a negative reaction by the viewing public, which ignored the aesthetic and technical qualities inherent in the photographs."

Alexander Gardner, Habitation of a rebel sharpshooter, Gettysburg, 1863. Collection [of] Eastman House, Rochester, New York, epitome courtesy of the Carnegie Arts of the Us Collection.

Timothy H. O'Sullivan, A Harvest of Expiry, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, July, 1863. Epitome courtesy of George Eastman House world wide web.eastmanhouse.org

In dissimilarity to the limited documentation and lack of surviving images of the Crimean War, the American Ceremonious War would get the most photographed war of the 19th century, with an enormous body of piece of work surviving the conflict. Coverage of this war differed greatly from earlier efforts in terms of content and distribution of images. The Civil War represented the commencement attempt to certificate a war broadly and systematically, spurred by the public'southward insatiable appetite for photographs.

Interestingly, Agnew's vision of mass-produced war imagery for consumption past the general public was realized at scale during the Civil War by other businessmen such as photographers Matthew Brady and Alexander Garner, who employed troops of photographers sent on consignment to document the state of war as it raged beyond the country. Joined by numerous individuals on both sides of the conflict, they collectively documented many of the same types of scenes created by previous war photographers and added two cardinal additions to the lexicon of war photography: images of the dead in the aftermath of battles, and the first images of active combat, taken from a distance every bit warships approached Fort Sumter in Charleston, S Carolina. As in many of Fenton's images, the photographers of the American Ceremonious War enhanced their images, moving bodies and calculation props in social club to create more compelling scenes. A famed case is establish in Alexander Gardner'south Home of a Insubordinate Sharpshooter, Gettysburg, in which he posed a fallen body with his ain rifle to create a narrative around the expiry of a Confederate soldier.

Alexander Gardner, Completely Silenced! (Expressionless Amalgamated Soldiers at Antietam), 1862. Prototype courtesy of George Eastman House www.eastmanhouse.org

Commercial distribution of Ceremonious War images proved much more successful with the American public than Agnew'due south attempts to sell images of the Crimean state of war. Prints were widely available for auction in shops around the country, and some photographers made their work available in comprehensive albums, such as Alexander Gardner's Gardner'southward Photographic Sketchbook of the War. Stereographs, paired images taken from slightly differing angles to produce a three-dimensional effect when viewed through a stereoscopic viewer, were an specially pop grade of entertainment during the Civil War. Almost center-course homes owned a viewer through which the family could marvel every bit images of the Ceremonious War (and other scenes) sprung to life.

The twentieth century ushered in an explosion of graphic state of war images, and despite new wars and changing techniques, the critical issues surrounding war photography raised during its earliest days have remained much the aforementioned. In War Photography in the Twentieth Century: A Brusk Critical History, Jason Francisco writes that "photographs became a main and uniquely powerful form of media widely recognized every bit crucial to the war effort." Magazines such as LIFE were dedicated to the proliferation of state of war images, continuing a similar (although more expansive and intentional) distribution process to that seen during the Civil War. Today, the avenues through which nosotros consume war imagery are even more rapid: the internet has given us instant access not just to official imagery, simply to the work of citizen photojournalists and the sometimes shocking imagery produced by our opponents in combat.

War photography provides us with the opportunity to learn near war from the safety of our homes. It engenders knowledge, understanding, and empathy, merely also desensitization.

– Megan O'Hearn

The images in this post are available in the Artstor Digital Library courtesy of the George Eastman House , the Amon Carter Museum of American Fine art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Carnegie Arts of the United States collection.

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Source: https://www.artstor.org/2016/11/11/seeing-is-believing-early-war-photography/

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