On Alexander Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War (review)

This book, part of a series on the history of photography, contains two essays about Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (1866), one by an art historian named Anthony W. Lee and another by a literary critic named Elizabeth Young. Acknowledging the importance of Gardner’s album of one hundred Civil War photographs as the first American photo essay, the one author focuses on the photographs and the other on the little essays Gardner provided to accompany the images.

The art historian has the better eye. The literary critic Young, analyzing a photograph of a cock fight in a Union camp, observes, “The photograph depicts two black men, in profile, on their knees, holding cocks that they are poised to release for a fight; they are surrounded by eleven white men sitting and standing above the black men. This arrangement is continuous . . . with an established abolitionist iconography of black men on their knees before white men in pleas for sympathy” (p. 82). In fact, one of the white men is crouching so low to the ground that his head is well below those of the African Americans. They are not literally surrounded by the white men, either, because Gardner has so posed the scene that the audience is in a semi-circle and the other side is left open for the cameraman to see the action in the circle.

The art historian Lee finds Gardner’s book a piece of “antinarrative,” frequently with “antiheroic” subjects; the whole production was “adamantly photographic.” That meant that Gardner was willing to live with photography’s limitations in covering warfare: no movement or action, only pictures behind the lines or in the aftermath of military action.

I do not see it that way. The album is best compared with its military art predecessors and media competitors: the portfolios or albums of lithographic or engraved prints, such as the famous sets from the Mexican American War of 1846–1848. For example, the War between the United States and Mexico Illustrated, a cooperative venture between newspaper correspondent George Wilkins Kendall and artist Carl Nebel, offered twelve prints presenting action and color. Photography as yet had neither. Therefore, Gardner’s album seems to have failed as a product for sale (it was very expensive: $150).

This is an interesting little volume that you can read easily in one afternoon. Lee places the album in the context of the photographic art of the day. Young calls our attention particularly to the subject of race in Gardner’s album. It would have been better to have three essays, adding one by a military historian. I was struck, for example, by the willingness of Gardner to embrace the presence of camp vices, such as cock fighting and the relaxing swig from a demijohn, in his selection of photographs, even as he showed his readers such images as “the tents of the Sanitary Commission . . . the Christian Commission . . . a church built by volunteer engineers “(p. 37). There is more to the culture of a Civil War military camp than these essays have exhausted here.