Images of War

by Yervand Kochar

The earliest permanent photographic image was taken in 1826. The Civil War struck in 1861. The only two wars that had been photographed prior to that date were the Mexican and Crimean Wars. The total of photographic images taken during those wars combined was 400. The total of the photographic images taken during the American civil War exceeded one million.

The Civil War was the first most photographed war. “It was the first conflict in which photographers consciously sought to capture war in all its horrors… By the spring of 1862, Mathew Brady’s talented crew of photographic operatives – Alexander Gardner, Timothy O’Sullivan, George N. Barnard, and James F. Gibson, among others – were actively following the armies, hauling their chemicals, fragile glass plates, and bulky wooden cameras in portable darkrooms. They recorded the gruesome aftermath of battle, and displayed in the picture galleries of Manhattan and Washington a shocking vision of crowded hospitals and the corpse-strewn fields of Antietam, Gettysburg, and Petersburg” ( ‘My Brother’s Face’ by C. Phillips & A. Axelrod).

The daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and tintypes could not be reproduced. “These one-of -a-kind images of loved ones were treated as revered icons”.
The photographic techniques were perfected during the war and mostly because of the war. To fulfill the increasing demand, the photographic process had to become more efficient and rapid in execution.
The collodion process allowed the photographers to make albumen prints which enhanced marketability and popularity of photographic images throughout the nations.

When the war began the majority on both sides was strongly convinced that it would finish in a matter of months. As it evolved into an enduring bloodshed, the quick victory euphoria dissolved rapidly. After devastating battles, gathered at the campfires, soldiers realized that some of their friends remained forever on a battlefield. The longer the war lasted the less vivid the faces of their dead friends became, ultimately to be forgotten. It seemed that a whole generation was vanishing without a trace in mass graves and battlefields where men and horses laid together. Entire families were disappearing caught in a process which by 1862 went entirely out of anybody’s control. Privates were as uncertain about the future as the Presidents. History took a hold of the war and seemed to be indifferent to its executioners.

Soldiers would spend their last money to be photographed. Taking a picture during the war was more than capturing an image. It was an attempt to capture a life vanishing, people and cities disappearing as if they’d not existed. It was an attempt to stop the insanity and horror, to steal faces from the grasp of death. As the men were dying in thousands from bullets, wounds and diseases their relatives carried their images in lockets, pocket watches and gutta-percha cases. For many families in the North and the South the original images of their sons, fathers and husbands were lost forever.