Today, September 17, marks 150 years since the single bloodiest day on US soil. In the corn fields, wagon roads, and stream beds near Sharpsburg, Md. The Union forces stopped a Confederate advance into northern territory at the Battle of Antietam. After 12 hours of intense combat over 23,000 men lay dead or wounded. During one particularly bloody hour a man died every second. While neither side won a decisive victory, the following day Southern commander Robert E. Lee took his army back across the Potomac, leaving the Union to claim victory. As one of the first significant Northern victories after a year and a half of war, it gave President Lincoln and opening and four days later he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, changing the course of the war and US history.
Antietam changed the country in another way as well. Photographs of the grizzly aftermath went on display in New York City, giving many the first view of the carnage of battle. At the time of the battle, photography was less than thirty years old. It would be many years before actual battle scenes were captured; this is primarily attributed to the slow and cumbersome photographic equipment which was better suited for the static, unmoving post-battle.
Up to this point, painting had often depicted heroic battle scenes, but even the most realistic were romanticized versions.There had been other pictures of the aftermath of war, famously the 1855 image by Roger Fenton from the Crimean War. But still, bodies were often excluded, or when included they were posed to give some dignity to the dead.
Photographer Alexander Gardner, working for Mathew Brady, shattered the glorious view of war with his unflinching images of Antietam’s dead. In the weeks and months after the battle, the images were put on display in Brady’s New York studio, advertised simply as “The Dead of Antietam.”
The exhibit drew large crowds, at least one attendee had also witnessed the battle. Poet Oliver Wendell Homes, Sr. expressed the sentiment of many of the photographs’ viewers when he wrote, “It is not us to bear witness to the fidelity of views which the truthful sunbeam has delineated in all their dread reality…The sight of these pictures is a commentary on civilization such as the savage might well triumph to show its missionaries.”
While, as a witness, Holmes did not believe the images truly evoked the feeling of the battle, he did acknowledge the photos had a significant impact on the viewing public. Today we live in a culture and society saturated in imagery, even war photography has become everyday. But imagine viewers who lived at a time when there was no precedence for such realistically violent imagery; the personal and cultural impact was significant.
Audiences were simultaneously entranced and repulsed; they were horrified yet could not look away. The New York Times described the scene, “You will see hushed, reverend groups standing around these weird copies of carnage – chained by the strange spell that dwells in dead men’s eyes.”
In the years since we may have become jaded, but images of war, battle, and death still have the power to arrest an audience and elicit powerful responses. Recent exhibits, such as Total War, and WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY hark back to Gardner and Brady’s exhibit. The images produced a century and a half ago opened a new way of seeings and exposed the media-consuming public to the horrors of war.
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