Feature
Photography in the American Civil War
One hundred and fifty years ago, a rapidly evolving imaging technology came to a divided nation where citizens were fighting each other on bloody battlefields. The rest, as they say, is history.
Fortifications at Yorktown, Va., during the Peninsula Campaign of 1862. Image is a digital scan of a stereographic wet collodion glass negative.
James F. Gibson /Library of Congress
For most of recorded human history, one person stood between armies and the people for whom they were fighting: the artist. The painter or sculptor was the intermediary who decided whether to make one side or the other look heroic, to hide the mistakes of the commanding officers or to disguise the gore of the slain bodies.
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