April 17, 2006
Mathew Brady vs. TV News Posted by Richard F. Snow at 11:30 AM EST In his recent exchange with Josh Zeitz about the greater power of current battlefield images as opposed to those of the Civil War, my colleague John Steele Gordon writes, “Mathew Brady photographs, haunting and gut-wrenching as they were, are not 24/7 color footage in your living room, any more than a wind-up gramophone playing 78s is an iPod.” This is, of course, perfectly true in a technical sense; and yet it’s important to remember the terrific emotional impact photographs of the Civil War era had upon those who saw them at the time. Mathew Brady’s photographers Alexander Gardner and James Gibson reached the scene of the awful fighting at Antietam almost while the battle was still in progress. They took 70 pictures of the field, and close to a third of them show corpses. Brady exhibited the photographs in his New York City gallery, and the effect of the shattered caissons and rows of dead—on an audience most of whose members were alive when the camera had been invented—can scarcely be exaggerated. A New York Times reporter wrote, “Of all objects of horror one would think the battle-field should stand preeminent, that it should bear the palm of repulsiveness. But on the contrary, there is a terrible fascination about it that draws one near these pictures, and makes him loth to leave them. You will see hushed, reverend [sic] groups standing around these weird copies of carnage, bending down to look in the pale faces of the dead, chained by the strange spell that dwells in dead men’s eyes. It seems somewhat singular that the same sun that looked down on the face of the slain, blistering them, blotting out from the bodies all semblances to humanity, and hastening corruption, should have thus caught their features upon canvas and given them perpetuity for ever.” The tone of this account suggests the writer barely distinguished between images of the battlefield and the field itself. So it was with Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had actually visited Antietam after the fighting, seeking his son who had been wounded there. After seeing the photographs, he wrote, “Let him who wishes to know what war is look at this series of illustrations. These wrecks of manhood thrown together in careless heaps or ranged in ghastly rows for burial were alive but yesterday. . . . Many people would not look through the series. Many, having seen it and dreamed of its horrors, would lock it up in some secret drawer, that it might not thrill or revolt those whose soul sickens at such sights. It is so nearly like visiting the battlefield to look over these views, that all the emotions excited by the actual sight of the stained and sordid scene, strewed with rags and wrecks, came back to us, and we buried them in the recesses of our cabinets as we would have buried the mutilated remains of the dead they too vividly represented.” Brady’s series of Antietam photographs sold well for the next three years, the thousands and thousands of viewers almost certainly experiencing feelings similar to those that vexed Holmes when he wrote, “It was so nearly like visiting the battlefield . . . that all the emotions excited by the actual sight . . . came back to us. [It] gives us . . . some conception of what a brutal, sickening, hideous thing it is, this dashing together of two frantic mobs to which we give the name of armies . . .”
|
