Existing comment:
Cameras at Antietam:
-- "The dead of the battle-field came up to us very rarely, even in dreams. We see the list in the morning paper at breakfast, but dismiss its recollection with the coffee. ... Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to use the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it." -- Review of Mathew B. Brady's "The Dead of Antietam" -- October 10, 1862
Although the camera had been introduced well prior to the outbreak f the Civil War, it was the war that provided a broad new market for photographs. Many Civil War soldiers had their portraits taken. With Antietam, the battlefield itself became a subject for the photographer's lens.
Antietam and its horrors attracted the attention of photographers associated with Mathew Brady's firm, which operated studios in New York and Washington. Brady employed itinerant photographers who, within days of the tragic battle, took nearly one hundred views of the soldiers and animals killed on the battlefield. "The Dead of Antietam," an exhibit put on at Brady's studio in October, shocked thousands of viewers. It brought Antietam's horrors graphically into public focus and contributed to Brady's fame. |