Class Year
2015
Document Type
Blog Post
Publication Date
2-21-2014
Department 1
Civil War Institute
Abstract
Photography: the ability to capture a moment in time exactly as it appeared, to then preserve it for posterity, even mass produce it for a wide viewership. A relatively new concept by the beginning of the American Civil War, photography quickly came into its own in the hands of such legends as Matthew Bray and Alexander Gardner as they sought to document the furious storm which had swept over the land. Photographs of the Civil War are prolific, and for many the memory of the conflict is intertwined with black-and-white photographs of unsmiling men and corpses bloating in the sun. Yet as I sat in Gettysburg College Special Collections, reverently paging through original issues of some of the era’s most famous illustrated newspapers, I could not help but notice the deficiencies inherent in Civil war photography when compared with other media, most notably the work of sketch artists. [excerpt]
Copyright Note
This is the author's version of the work. This publication appears in Gettysburg College's institutional repository by permission of the copyright owner for personal use, not for redistribution.
Recommended Citation
Caswell, Bryan G., "A Living Image: Newspaper Sketches in the American Civil War" (2014). The Gettysburg Compiler: On the Front Lines of History. 32.
https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/compiler/32
Included in
American Art and Architecture Commons, Photography Commons, United States History Commons
Comments
This blog post originally appeared in The Gettysburg Compiler and was created by students at Gettysburg College.