Photography and the American Civil War

Rosenheim, Jeff L. (2013)

This title is in print.

Arcana: Books on the Arts, Book of the Day (2013)
College Art Association Alfred H. Barr Jr. Book Award, Winner (2014)
BIGNY Book Show (2014)

Read a blog post about the catalogue on Now at the Met.

Publication Details

Description

From the moment the first photographs of the war appeared in the public sphere, their authority and visual power shaped the direction of American art. The dramatic events documented so effectively by the camera moved Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, Eastman Johnson, and other painters of the era to use an even more symbolic vocabulary. This in turn freed photography to focus on physical realities—the facts of life and death—that define the human experience. By the early decades of the twentieth century, when most of the combatants were dead, the photographs of the Civil War had developed a potent resonance that would last for years. Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, William Eggleston, and many others sharpened their observational and interpretive skills by looking at photographs by Brady, Alexander Gardner, Timothy H. O'Sullivan, and Andrew Joseph Russell. The images by these four photographres and all the others featured in this book remain a vibrant tradition for artists working today.

This exhibition comprises more than two hundred photographs, among them thirteen from the Museum's 1933 acquisition and thirty-two acquired in 2005 from the renowned holdings of the Gilman Paper Company. This second major purchase of Civil War photographs included a mint-condition copy of America's first photographic anthology, Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War, from 1866. Together, with George N. Barnard's Photographic Views of Sherman's Campaign from the same year, purchased by the Metropolitan in 1970, Gardner's two-volume masterpiece forms the foundation of the Metropolitan's celebrated collection of nineteenth-century American photographs.

Table of contents

Director's Foreword

Prologue: Shadows of Ourselves

The Dead of Antietam

Photography before the War

Lincoln and the 1860 Presidential Election

Secession and Fort Sumter

Early War Portraits

Missing the Picture, Bull Run, 1861–62

Gardner and His Photographic Sketch Book

Ambrotypes and Tintypes

Cartes de Visite and Other Paper Prints

Collecting the Wounded

Barnard and His Views of Sherman's Campaign

War's End and Lincoln's Assassination

Epilogue: The Slow Recovery

Notes
Selected Bibliography
Checklist
Acknowledgments
Index

About the authors

Jeff L. Rosenheim is Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Press reviews

Publishers Weekly

"Rosenheim weaves the rhetorical and material realities of the war years by attaching them to the photographic image."

Civil War News

"Beautifully bound and printed, as can be expected from a volume from the Metropolitan, this is more than a coffee-table book. The author’s commentary is scholarly and well written and gives important background to the photography and images in each chapter."

Culture Concept Circle

“The exhibition is organized by Jeff L. Rosenheim, Curator in Charge of the Museum’s Department of Photographs. He has also written the fully illustrated catalogue which was made possible by the Roswell L. Gilpatric Publications Fund.”

The New York Times

“...excellent book-length catalog essay...Perusing this book you might surmise that what mainly drove the surge in photography during the Civil War was emotional need in the face of mass death. You feel the enormity of that on almost every page.”

Artinfo blog

“The program’s lead guest is Jeff Rosenheim, the curator of the exhibition and the author of the excellent book that accompanies it.”

New York Social Diary

“Be sure to purchase the splendid catalogue designed by Laura Lindgren with text by the show’s curator, Mr. Rosenheim.”

Richard B. Woodward

“Drawing on reliable scholarship in a field that for decades lacked any; on the outstanding collections of Stanley B. Burns, Brian D. Caplan and the Gilman Paper Co., among others; and on the busy community of Civil War bloggers, Mr. Rosenheim has produced a handsome volume packed with new information. Many attributions that once seemed settled are here revealed to be less than secure.”

The New York Review of Books

“The claim of the new art was that it offered the most accurate rendering of a person, place, or thing. Also the most accessible: as Jeff Rosenheim tells us in Photography and the American Civil War—his splendid catalog of the exhibition on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

World of Interiors

“Rivieting...For a book of this scope and depth, academic, meticulously researched and a corrective to so much that has gone before, the text reads throughout like a thriller.”

Related Titles

Titles by thematic category (218)

American Art, 19th Century

Titles by author (19)

Jeff Rosenheim

Plan Ahead

MetPublications