"A terrible fascination" : Civil War photography and the advent of photographic realism

Abstract

This thesis deals with the social, aesthetic, and historical significance of Civil War era photography, with special emphasis on Alexander Gardner’s photographs from the Battle of Antietam. My thesis argues that Antietam was a watershed moment in photography, for Gardner’s Antietam images represented the medium’s first step towards establishing its own unique photographic aesthetic. This new photographic aesthetic was firmly grounded in a literal realism that did not exist in other forms of representation, such as painting or engraving. This realism dispelled American ideological notions of God-sanctioned, pastoral innocence, and forced Americans to confront the savagery in their own midst. Apart from their aesthetic legacy, the Antietam images also gave birth to the separate medium of war photography, and represented the birth of photojournalism.

Chapter one addresses the origins of photography, with particular emphasis on its connection to the nineteenth century aesthetic movement and its close relationship to portrait painting. Chapter two examines in-depth the most important photographs from the Battle of Antietam. By analyzing how the American public reacted to these images, this chapter reveals how Alexander Gardner’s photographs invalidated the aesthetic ideology of nineteenth century America. Chapter three examines some of Alexander Gardner’s most important photographs from the Gettysburg and Virginia campaigns of 1864 and 1865. It emphasizes Gardner’s drift from compositions depicting masses of battlefield casualties in favor of close-range, highly personalized images of individual corpses. The thesis concludes with the legacy of Gardner’s Civil War photographs by exploring their value as pieces of commemorative art that invoke the true memory of the Civil War.