A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, born Ireland, 1840–1882)
Date: July 1863
Accession Number: 2005.100.1201
Image courtesy of www.metmuseum.org
Photography & American Civil War at the Metropolitan The exhibition ‘Photography and the American Civil War’ brings together more than 200 of the finest and most poignant photographs of the American Civil War. Metropolitan Museum, New York, April 2 – September 2, 2013.]]>
Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
At the start of the Civil War, the nation’s photography galleries and image purveyors were overflowing with a variety of photographs of all kinds and sizes, many examples of which will be featured in the exhibition: portraits made on thin sheets of copper (daguerreotypes), glass (ambrotypes), or iron (tintypes), each housed in a small decorative case; and larger, “painting-sized” likenesses on paper, often embellished with India ink, watercolor, and oils.
The exhibition features groundbreaking works by Mathew B. Brady, George N. Barnard, Alexander Gardner, and Timothy O’Sullivan, among many others. It also examines in-depth the important, if generally misunderstood, role played by Brady, perhaps the most famous of all wartime photographers, in conceiving the first extended photographic coverage of any war. The exhibition addresses the widely held, but inaccurate, belief that Brady produced most of the surviving Civil War images, although he actually made very few field photographs during the conflict. Instead, he commissioned and published, over his own name and imprint, negatives made by an ever-expanding team of field operators, including Gardner, O’Sullivan, and Barnard.
Among the many highlights of the exhibition is a superb selection of early wartime portraits of soldiers and officers who sat for their likenesses before leaving their homes for the war front. In these one-of-a-kind images, a picture of American society emerges. The rarest are ambrotypes and tintypes of Confederates, drawn from the renowned collection of David Wynn Vaughan, who has assembled the country’s premier archive of Southern portraits. These seldom-seen photographs, and those by their Northern counterparts, will balance the well-known and often-reproduced views of bloody battlefields, defensive works, and the specialized equipment of 19th-century war.
The exhibition is organized by Jeff L. Rosenheim, Curator in Charge of the Museum’s Department of Photographs.
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