With these new ways to kill in place, the official number of Americans who died as a result of the war, both battlefield deaths and those who succumbed to their wounds later, long stood at about 618,000. Library of Congress A dead Confederate soldier at the Battle of Petersburg, in Petersburg, Virginia. Chronicling The Bloodshed Of The Civil War Furthermore, they ensured photography's position as an indispensable mass medium able to transmit its message to the illiterate as easily as to the most well-read. The photographers who braved the Civil War battlefields blazed the trail for the next century and a half of photojournalists. Intrepid photographers like Alexander Gardner and Mathew Brady took their cameras out onto the battlefields of the Civil War and captured its grim realities, stripping the conflict of the romance around warfare that had been commonly found in earlier periods. New chemical processes for the capture, treatment, and development of a photographic image were far more cumbersome and delicate than those in place today, but they were refined enough for trained professionals to take cameras into the world and produce the first real documentary photographs anyone had ever seen.Īs a result, the American Civil War became one of the first armed conflicts to be extensively documented through photography (with the Crimean War the only possible precursor). Thanks to the advances in camera and photograph-processing technology, exposure times required for pictures were vastly reduced to a few seconds in most cases - or even less. By the outbreak of the American Civil War some three decades later, pictures of people and events still weren't widespread, but that was all about to change. The exposure process still took several days, however, so its utility in documenting historical events was virtually nonexistent.Ī few years later, Niépce began working with Louis Daguerre - of daguerreotype fame - who would go on to pioneer the process of photography after Niépce's death in the early 1830s. Invented in 1824 by Nicéphore Niépce, heliography was the first-ever process created to preserve an image from the light striking a silver plate, bringing the world the very first documents akin to what we know as photographs. Mütter Museum On June 18, 1864, a cannon shot took both of Alfred Stratton's arms. How The Civil War Transformed Photography From A Novelty Into A Mass Medium However, a colorized photo of the Civil War general reminds us that he was a flesh-and-blood person, one who was important to one of American history's defining chapters. William Tecumseh Sherman in shades of gray can feel like artifacts from another world. For most of human history, this was all the public could access - if they were lucky.īut photography brought the immediacy and stark truths of important events to the masses for the first time - no matter that it was black and white for audiences who had never seen a photograph of any kind before.Īnd today - with color cameras on the phones we all carry around in our pockets - pictures of, say, Union Gen. November 1864.īefore the dawn of photography, people were used to seeing drawings or paintings of an event, pulled from the fallible memories of an artist or from the secondhand accounts of witnesses long after the fact. Library of Congress A colorized photo of African American Union soldiers during the Civil War.
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