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Armstrong, Jennifer Photo by Brady: A Picture of the Civil War
Atheneum, 2005 [160p] illus. with photographs
ISBN 0-689-85785-3 $18.95
Reviewed from galleys
Gr. 6-10
We all know exactly what the Civil War looked like, don't we? Thanks
to the photographs of Mathew Brady and his one-time partner Alexander Gardner,
we know the stoic, staring faces of the soldiers, the high collar and sunken
cheeks of Lincoln before his election, the dignity of white-haired Lee with
hat in hand after the war, the wounded on stretchers, the "contraband" in
flight, the corpses in trenches. But just how candid are these pictures? What
images are missing, and why? And if we still feel an emotional jolt across
nearly a century and a half, what did these photos mean to the torn country
itself? In this thought-provoking work, Armstrong explores the body of photographs
that are generally--and often too loosely--attributed to Brady and
discusses how they influenced the war and fixed it in popular imagination.
Opening sections introduce Brady, the artist and businessman, and clarify the
technical limitations of mid-nineteenth-century photography that directly bear
upon the documentation of the war. Already a renowned portrait photographer,
Brady worked within a studio tradition that not only allowed but demanded careful
staging of the subject, manipulation of light, and addition of appropriate
props--a tradition that he would carry onto the battlefield. He would
also maintain the distinction between artist and technician, setting up the
poses himself and relegating the actual camera work to an operator. Never quite
the businessman his partner Alexander Gardner would be, Brady nonetheless recognized
that the coming hostilities would promote a steady trade in cartes de visite as soldiers clamored for parting mementos and in battle-scene photos for newspaper
lithographs. The crankiness of glass-plate photography, with its requirements
of cumbersome equipment, still subjects, ample light, long exposures, and a
ready source of fresh water, would, despite Brady's artistry and commercial
acumen, impose serious constraints on which images he and his operators could
actually collect in the field.
With this background established, Armstrong turns to a chronological tour of
the battlegrounds and, with the aid of a dense gallery of meticulously captioned
Brady (and later Gardner) Studio photos, she deftly traces the interplay between
the war and its documentation. The Union Army welcomed whatever images they
could obtain for reconnaissance purposes, soldiers with access to illustrated
papers gained some sense of military developments on other fronts, and civilians
were shocked by the reality of the carnage that letters from the combatants
could only suggest: "Pictures of this sort--the blood still fresh
and the bodies still warm (or so it seemed to the shuddering visitors)--had
never been shown to the public." At least as intriguing as the extant
photos are those images conspicuous by their absence. There is no photo from
the first battle of Bull Run, Armstrong points out, because Brady's wagon
was upended by retreating Union soldiers. There is no picture of Lincoln delivering
his address at Gettysburg, because his brief speech was over before photographers
could set up their cameras. There are no action scenes, no night scenes, no
winter scenes, no indoor scenes, and often no scenes from areas with murky
water. There are, however, plenty of photos of the dead, the most cooperative
of subjects, who docilely pose under the wide blue sky and silently accept
whichever label--"Reb" or "Yank"--the photographer
assigns.
Armstrong confines her attention to the Civil War, but she leaves readers well
prepared to examine critically the still and video images from contemporary
conflicts by pursuing those questions already applied to Brady's work:
How candid are these pictures? What images are missing, and why? As her imaginative
sidebar scenarios of "The Photograph Not Taken" suggest, the pictorial
view of war is always incomplete and subtly fashioned by the photographer's
skill, intent, and luck. This insight should serve young adults well as they
aspire to be better historians, better photographers, and better citizens.
Elizabeth Bush, Reviewer
Cover illustration from Photo by Brady: A Picture of the Civil War ©2005.
Used by permission of Atheneum Books for Young Readers.
This page was last updated on April 1, 2005.