Biography american civil war photos confederate
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Civil War Photographs
Introduction
The Civil War was the first large and prolonged conflict recorded by photography. During the war, dozens of photographers--both as private individuals and as employees of the Confederate and Union Governments--photographed civilians and civilian activities; military personnel, equipment, and activities; and the locations and aftermaths of battles. Because wet-plate collodion negatives required from 5 to 20 seconds exposure, there are no action photographs of the war.
The name Mathew B. Brady is almost a synonym for Civil War photography. Although Brady himself actually may have taken only a few photographs of the war, he employed many of the other well-known photographers before and during the war. Alexander Gardner and James F. Gibson at different times managed Brady's Washington studio. Timothy O'Sullivan, James Gardner, and Egbert Guy Fox were also employed by Brady during the conflict.
The pictures listed in this select list of ph
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Background
The daguerreotype process, which produced an image on a metal tallrik, was released to the public in 1839. It was named after its inventor, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre of France, who had collaborated with Joseph-Nicéphore Niepce. The same year, William Henry Fox Talbot in England announced a photographic process that produced paper negatives and prints. The collodion process (wherein a glass is coated with a sticky substance, sensitized, immediately exposed, and then developed and fixed) surpassed the daguerreotype in popularity by the late 1850s. A single wet-plate collodion negative yielded many positive images. During the Civil War era, the ambrotype—an image on glass—joined the tintype—an image on an iron plate—as popular means of distributing images. Audiences also greatly consumed the carte de visite—a portrait glued to paper stock.
By the time of the Civil War, photography was increasingly professionalized. Journals and national organizations dedicated to the me
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Photography and the Civil War, 1861–65
On April 15, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln called up 75,000 militiamen to put down an insurrection of southern states. Mathew B. Brady secured permission from Lincoln to follow the troops in what was expected to be a short and glorious war; he saw only the first engagement, however, and lost his wagons and equipment in the tumult of defeat. Deciding to forgo further action himself, Brady instead financed a corps of field photographers who, together with those employed by the Union military command and by Alexander Gardner, made the first extended photographic coverage of a war.
The terrible contest proceeded erratically; just as the soldiers learned to fight this war in the field, so the photographers improvised their reports. Because the battlefields were too chaotic and dangerous for the painstaking wet-plate procedures to be carried out, photographers could depict only strategic sites (33.65.352, .391), camp scenes, preparations for or r