Civil War Photography and Ethics
One particularly memorable Gettysburg photograph was clearly staged—a decipherable dishonesty though it took nearly one hundred years for Civil War historians to note the inaccuracy. On this one soldier alone, Gardner, Gibson, and O’Sullivan spent nearly one hour, though perhaps more, as they finished six photograph studies of this young Confederate, as W. Frassanito (1996) notes in Gettysburg (p. 191). For this staged photograph, the body of a killed Confederate soldier was moved about seventy-two yards; several props, such as the gun, blanket, and haversack, were also added to this iconic image (Frassanito, Gettysburg, p. 187). Frassanito, however, originally thought that “After recording the preceding group, Gardner’s men moved some forty yards away and were struck by the photographic potential of the scene they found” (Gettysburg, p. 191). Although the revision of distance appears inconsequential compared to the questionable act of moving the body of a Confederate soldier killed during the battle though not yet showing signs of decomposition, Gardner, O’Sullivan, and Gibson, by transposing the temporal and reverential with the commodification significance, create a pictorial dislocation from reality that this staged photograph inescapably exhibits. If the aim was to imprint the truth on a glass plate with collodion and silver, then it remains an altered truth, a corona blotted by commodification. In contrast, J. Snyder (2014) defends this decision by Gardner and his team to stage Civil War photographs because “Gardner had to employ several creative manipulations to his photographs . . . to tell a bigger story” (p. 1). Additionally, this desire to narrate a fulfilling background story pushed Alexander Gardner to compose text that accompanied the hundred or so photographs in the Photographic Sketch Book. This Gettysburg photograph was romantic fiction. The dramatic effect achieved by this photographic and textual manipulation diminished and distorted the realism that was advertised, a signification of the Antietam and Gettysburg photographs that must be explored.
This staged photograph of a dead Confederate soldier represents a singularity for Gardner’s team of photographers. It is the only photograph Alexander Gardner, Timothy O’Sullivan, and James F. Gibson staged when they took this series of photographs of the aftermath of the battle of Gettysburg. This Civil War photograph also embodies a fragment, a denied photographic narrative that makes this young soldier’s personal narrative unknowable and miscommunicated.
Of course, Gardner presents a narrative frame for this staged and now controversial photograph when he writes in the Photographic Sketch Book that “The artist, in passing over the scene of the previous days’ engagements, found in a lonely place the covert of a rebel sharpshooter, and photographed the scene presented here.” This text, seemingly innocent, contains inaccuracies that the 1865/1866 audience, and many more generations beyond this audience, did not decipher. First, Gardner mentions artist, singular, but he spent nearly a week with Gibson and O’Sullivan on the trip to Gettysburg, the time spent photographing the battle scenes, and then the return trip to Washington, D. C. The artists certainly passed over and through the Gettysburg battlefield, but this soldier is likely not a sharpshooter. Here, the word sharpshooter stimulates thoughts of a menacing enemy, one who calculated each trigger pull, thereby highlighting the vulnerability of the Union soldiers who were harassed by the sharpshooters in Devil’s Den, another move toward pathos. Lastly, the final independent clause reflects a lie. The scene presented negates any questionable acts that Gardner and his team may have committed to present this scene dramatically and artistically. If the moving of the body was permissible at the time, perhaps even expected, why hide this information? As S. Franklin (2016) stresses, “One obvious danger is the ease with which the origins of a staged image, or an artist’s intentions, can be forgotten over time” (p. 1). Here, the problem of staging remained hidden because Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book sold poorly as Americans rushed to forget the war and its disconcerting photographs and narratives. Perhaps the staged photograph, as John Ruskin indicates for other artwork, acknowledges “moral truth” more vividly than it can “material truth” (as cited in Franklin, 2016, p. 1). Gardner exposes a weakness of telling a story primarily through a dramatic image—the moral that war is too easily glorified can be declared through an accumulation of images that prove this point, or it can be supported by a single memorable and evocative photograph.
Gardner, in the text that accompanies this famous photograph, notes that the soldier may have allowed his final thoughts to return to home, evoking a moment of pathos that suggests the fragility of life and how quickly it can be withdrawn from military equations. Devoting the narrative to emotional resonance, Gardner asks, “Was he delirious with agony, or did death come slowly to his relief, while memories of home grew dearer as the field of carnage faded before him?” (Photographic Sketch Book). Simultaneously and with triggers of pathos, the viewer’s thoughts turn to the homecoming because there will be no journey’s end for this soldier. He is denied that homecoming as he was denied burial, at least for a time. Even when Lincoln dedicated the Gettysburg National Cemetery, this soldier would find no home in the national memorial, as Union soldiers earned a burial and marker while Confederate soldiers were shipped to the South. Today, this choice to send Confederate soldiers to the South for reburial seems unkind, as Lincoln never observed that the South could leave the Union. American Civil War soldiers, with certainty, should be judged as American soldiers first. What is lost by this division is an opportunity for national grief and individual loss, a memory untainted by nostalgia.
A final comment from Gardner evokes a nostalgic return by the author and photographer to this spot when he arrived at Gettysburg in November of 1863 for the dedication ceremonies; he recalls that “The musket, rusted by many storms, still leaned against the rock, and the skeleton of the soldier lay undisturbed within the mouldering uniform, as did the cold form of the dead four months before” (Photographic Sketch Book). Of course, this narrative is fabricated, exemplifying an “ethics of deception” in S. Franklin’s (2016) words (p. 2), as Union soldiers buried the Confederates in mass graves, relic hunters came to the Gettysburg battlefield almost immediately after the battle to collect memorabilia, and soldiers who fought at Gettysburg returned to the battlefield to reenact major events from those early July days of 1863. The “prop” gun would not have been left to rust, the body of this Confederate soldier was not hidden and so would not have been left permanently unburied, and the “mouldering” uniform signifies an incomplete act of burial that does not register as the truth. When these broken narratives get repeated as national myths, the viewer cannot place what is relevant from what is doubtful.
Questions of a Failed Morality
Gardner and his team’s choice to move this Confederate soldier from one position to another more photographically appealing location raises issues of morality. What morality operated during the Civil War? Did Gardner and his team violate morals related to the treatment of the dead? Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address notes one type of morality, when Lincoln writes “It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.” Here, the President declares that memorial dedications for the lost and for those who served is necessary to create a national sense of honor. Gardner also highlights a morality when he remarks in the Photographic Sketch Book that the photograph operates by “a useful moral: It shows the blank horror and reality of war, in opposition to its pageantry.” The horror of the Civil War never changes; staged or unmanipulated, a photograph cannot alter this horror, whether it is the Confederate soldier who was placed in Devil’s Den or the bloated and distorted corpses at Antietam. The reality of war and the way that reality contrasts with American romantic beliefs about war as pageantry are important morals, but to present this reality through deception embraces a dishonesty that cannot be reconciled morally. Permit one last explanation: Gardner and his team, of course, created these photographs so that they could record the tragedy of each battle, and they planned to sell these photographs. The photographers as artists also recognized that these photographs would endure and serve as historical documents to study. J. H. Newton (2005) reveals that this study of photographs and how they create meaning includes an ethical component when she contends that “images and imaging affect the ways we think, feel, behave, and create, use, and interpret meaning, for good or for bad” (her italics, p. 433). If there was nothing to hide about moving the body, Gardner should have written about how the photograph made meaning by being staged. W. Benjamin (2006) sympathizes with this point by pleading that “The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced” (p. 21). From the beginning, the staging of the photograph never surfaced. However, the audience, with training, could interpret the photograph for how it works ethically, and as the culture changes, the audience interpretation and reaction to a staged scene would likewise progress. Drama and perceived commercial success should not trump truthfulness.
Civil War Photography and Ethics
One particularly memorable Gettysburg photograph was clearly staged—a decipherable dishonesty though it took nearly one hundred years for Civil War historians to note the inaccuracy. On this one soldier alone, Gardner, Gibson, and O’Sullivan spent nearly one hour, though perhaps more, as they finished six photograph studies of this young Confederate, as W. Frassanito (1996) notes in Gettysburg (p. 191). For this staged photograph, the body of a killed Confederate soldier was moved about seventy-two yards; several props, such as the gun, blanket, and haversack, were also added to this iconic image (Frassanito, Gettysburg, p. 187). Frassanito, however, originally thought that “After recording the preceding group, Gardner’s men moved some forty yards away and were struck by the photographic potential of the scene they found” (Gettysburg, p. 191). Although the revision of distance appears inconsequential compared to the questionable act of moving the body of a Confederate soldier killed during the battle though not yet showing signs of decomposition, Gardner, O’Sullivan, and Gibson, by transposing the temporal and reverential with the commodification significance, create a pictorial dislocation from reality that this staged photograph inescapably exhibits. If the aim was to imprint the truth on a glass plate with collodion and silver, then it remains an altered truth, a corona blotted by commodification. In contrast, J. Snyder (2014) defends this decision by Gardner and his team to stage Civil War photographs because “Gardner had to employ several creative manipulations to his photographs . . . to tell a bigger story” (p. 1). Additionally, this desire to narrate a fulfilling background story pushed Alexander Gardner to compose text that accompanied the hundred or so photographs in the Photographic Sketch Book. This Gettysburg photograph was romantic fiction. The dramatic effect achieved by this photographic and textual manipulation diminished and distorted the realism that was advertised, a signification of the Antietam and Gettysburg photographs that must be explored.
This staged photograph of a dead Confederate soldier represents a singularity for Gardner’s team of photographers. It is the only photograph Alexander Gardner, Timothy O’Sullivan, and James F. Gibson staged when they took this series of photographs of the aftermath of the battle of Gettysburg. This Civil War photograph also embodies a fragment, a denied photographic narrative that makes this young soldier’s personal narrative unknowable and miscommunicated.
Of course, Gardner presents a narrative frame for this staged and now controversial photograph when he writes in the Photographic Sketch Book that “The artist, in passing over the scene of the previous days’ engagements, found in a lonely place the covert of a rebel sharpshooter, and photographed the scene presented here.” This text, seemingly innocent, contains inaccuracies that the 1865/1866 audience, and many more generations beyond this audience, did not decipher. First, Gardner mentions artist, singular, but he spent nearly a week with Gibson and O’Sullivan on the trip to Gettysburg, the time spent photographing the battle scenes, and then the return trip to Washington, D. C. The artists certainly passed over and through the Gettysburg battlefield, but this soldier is likely not a sharpshooter. Here, the word sharpshooter stimulates thoughts of a menacing enemy, one who calculated each trigger pull, thereby highlighting the vulnerability of the Union soldiers who were harassed by the sharpshooters in Devil’s Den, another move toward pathos. Lastly, the final independent clause reflects a lie. The scene presented negates any questionable acts that Gardner and his team may have committed to present this scene dramatically and artistically. If the moving of the body was permissible at the time, perhaps even expected, why hide this information? As S. Franklin (2016) stresses, “One obvious danger is the ease with which the origins of a staged image, or an artist’s intentions, can be forgotten over time” (p. 1). Here, the problem of staging remained hidden because Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book sold poorly as Americans rushed to forget the war and its disconcerting photographs and narratives. Perhaps the staged photograph, as John Ruskin indicates for other artwork, acknowledges “moral truth” more vividly than it can “material truth” (as cited in Franklin, 2016, p. 1). Gardner exposes a weakness of telling a story primarily through a dramatic image—the moral that war is too easily glorified can be declared through an accumulation of images that prove this point, or it can be supported by a single memorable and evocative photograph.
Gardner, in the text that accompanies this famous photograph, notes that the soldier may have allowed his final thoughts to return to home, evoking a moment of pathos that suggests the fragility of life and how quickly it can be withdrawn from military equations. Devoting the narrative to emotional resonance, Gardner asks, “Was he delirious with agony, or did death come slowly to his relief, while memories of home grew dearer as the field of carnage faded before him?” (Photographic Sketch Book). Simultaneously and with triggers of pathos, the viewer’s thoughts turn to the homecoming because there will be no journey’s end for this soldier. He is denied that homecoming as he was denied burial, at least for a time. Even when Lincoln dedicated the Gettysburg National Cemetery, this soldier would find no home in the national memorial, as Union soldiers earned a burial and marker while Confederate soldiers were shipped to the South. Today, this choice to send Confederate soldiers to the South for reburial seems unkind, as Lincoln never observed that the South could leave the Union. American Civil War soldiers, with certainty, should be judged as American soldiers first. What is lost by this division is an opportunity for national grief and individual loss, a memory untainted by nostalgia.
A final comment from Gardner evokes a nostalgic return by the author and photographer to this spot when he arrived at Gettysburg in November of 1863 for the dedication ceremonies; he recalls that “The musket, rusted by many storms, still leaned against the rock, and the skeleton of the soldier lay undisturbed within the mouldering uniform, as did the cold form of the dead four months before” (Photographic Sketch Book). Of course, this narrative is fabricated, exemplifying an “ethics of deception” in S. Franklin’s (2016) words (p. 2), as Union soldiers buried the Confederates in mass graves, relic hunters came to the Gettysburg battlefield almost immediately after the battle to collect memorabilia, and soldiers who fought at Gettysburg returned to the battlefield to reenact major events from those early July days of 1863. The “prop” gun would not have been left to rust, the body of this Confederate soldier was not hidden and so would not have been left permanently unburied, and the “mouldering” uniform signifies an incomplete act of burial that does not register as the truth. When these broken narratives get repeated as national myths, the viewer cannot place what is relevant from what is doubtful.
Questions of a Failed Morality
Gardner and his team’s choice to move this Confederate soldier from one position to another more photographically appealing location raises issues of morality. What morality operated during the Civil War? Did Gardner and his team violate morals related to the treatment of the dead? Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address notes one type of morality, when Lincoln writes “It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.” Here, the President declares that memorial dedications for the lost and for those who served is necessary to create a national sense of honor. Gardner also highlights a morality when he remarks in the Photographic Sketch Book that the photograph operates by “a useful moral: It shows the blank horror and reality of war, in opposition to its pageantry.” The horror of the Civil War never changes; staged or unmanipulated, a photograph cannot alter this horror, whether it is the Confederate soldier who was placed in Devil’s Den or the bloated and distorted corpses at Antietam. The reality of war and the way that reality contrasts with American romantic beliefs about war as pageantry are important morals, but to present this reality through deception embraces a dishonesty that cannot be reconciled morally. Permit one last explanation: Gardner and his team, of course, created these photographs so that they could record the tragedy of each battle, and they planned to sell these photographs. The photographers as artists also recognized that these photographs would endure and serve as historical documents to study. J. H. Newton (2005) reveals that this study of photographs and how they create meaning includes an ethical component when she contends that “images and imaging affect the ways we think, feel, behave, and create, use, and interpret meaning, for good or for bad” (her italics, p. 433). If there was nothing to hide about moving the body, Gardner should have written about how the photograph made meaning by being staged. W. Benjamin (2006) sympathizes with this point by pleading that “The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced” (p. 21). From the beginning, the staging of the photograph never surfaced. However, the audience, with training, could interpret the photograph for how it works ethically, and as the culture changes, the audience interpretation and reaction to a staged scene would likewise progress. Drama and perceived commercial success should not trump truthfulness.