‘Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness ofwar. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, hehas done something very like it.’ – NEW YORK TIMES
It was at Antietam, the blood-churning battle in Sharpsburg, Md., where more Americans died in a single day than ever had before, that one Union soldier recalled how “the piles of dead … were frightful.” The Scottish-born photographer Alexander Gardner arrived there two days after the September 17, 1862, slaughter. He set up his stereo wet-plate camera and started taking dozens of images of the body-strewn countryside, documenting fallen soldiers, burial crews and trench graves. Gardner worked for Mathew Brady, and when hereturned to New York City his employer arranged an exhibition of the work.
Visitors were greeted with a plain sign reading “The Dead of Antietam.” But what they saw wasanything but simple. Genteel society came upon what are believed to be the first recorded images of war casualties. Gardner’s photographs are so sharp that people could make outfaces. The death was unfiltered, and a war that had seemed remote suddenly became harrowingly immediate.
Gardner helped make Americans realize the significance of the fratricide that by 1865 would take more than 600,000 lives. For in the hallowed fields fell not faceless strangers but sons, brothers, fathers, cousins and friends. And Gardner’s images of Antietam created a lasting legacy by establishing a painfully potent visual precedent for the way all wars have since been covered.