In October 1862, crowds gathered at photographer Mathew Brady's New York studio to gaze at images of the Civil War, especially at gruesome views of corpses on the battlefield. "Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war," declared the New York Times. "You will see hushed, reverent groups standing around these weird copies of carnage, bending down to look at the dead....These pictures have a terrible distinctness." Entrepreneurs like Brady and his staff of photographers played an innovative role in the Civil War. Just as new technologies reshaped military strategy, so did the camera transform the image of war. Some fifteen hundred wartime photographers, who took tens of thousands of photos in makeshift studios, in army camps, and in the field, brought visions of military life to people at home. The Civil War became the first heavily photographed war in history.

Invented in 1839, the camera had played a small part in the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) and the Crimean War (1854-1855), but the still-unsophisticated nature of photography limited its influence. Photographs of the 1840s and 1850s were mainly daguerreotypes, reversed images (mirror images) on silver-coated surfaces of copper plates. The daguerreotype process required between fifteen and thirty minutes of exposure and produced only one image. Most daguerreotypes were stiff-looking portraits made in studios. Cheaper versions of daguerreotypes, ambrotypes (negatives on glass) and tintypes (negatives on iron), remained popular for years to come. In the 1850s, a new era of photography opened, with the development of the wet-plate or collodion process and the printing of photographs on paper. In the wet-plate process, the photographer coated a glass plate, or negative, with a chemical solution; exposed the negative (took the photo); and developed it at once in a darkroom. The new process required a short exposure time--a few second outdoors and up to a minute indoors--and lent itself to landscapes as well as portraits. Most important, the wet-plate process enabled photographers to generate multiple prints from a single negative. Professional photographers could now mass-produce prints of photos for a wide audience; the wet-plate process made photography not just a craft but a profitable enterprise.

Using new methods and older ones, Civil War photographers churned out many portraits of individual soldiers, often made in temporary tents in army camps; some were ambrotypes or tintypes, and others were cartes-de-visite, or mass-produced portraits mounted on cards (see the first page of this chapter). They disseminated images of political leaders and battle sites; some were stereographs, or two images, each made from the position of one eye, which, fused together, created a sense of spatial depth. Lugging their heavy equipment with them, including portable dark-boxes for developing images, wartime photographers competed both with one another and

with sketch artists who also sought to record the war. Wood engravings derived from photographs appeared alongside lithographs in popular magazines such

as Harpers Weekly and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly. Finally, the Union army used photography for military purposes. Photographers in the army's employ took photos of maps, battle terrain, bridges, armaments, and even medical procedures. The Union army's Surgeon General commissioned and collected hundreds of photos to illustrate case studies and surgical techniques.

Several factors limited the scope of Civil War photography. First, most camera work of the war years was northern; the Union blockade of the South, dwindling photographic supplies, and the sinking Confederate economy curbed southern photography. Photos of the South became part of the record mainly as Union forces invaded the Confederacy. Second, no Civil War photos showed battles in progress; action photos were not yet possible. Instead, photographers rushed to arrive right after battles had ended, perhaps with cannon and smoke in the distance, to photograph casualties before bodies were removed. But limitations aside, the camera now served, in Mathew Brady's words, as "the eye of history." Americans of the Civil War era appreciated the minute detail of photographs and the apparent truthfulness of the camera. They also responded with emotion to the content of photographs--to the courage of soldiers, to the massive might of the Union army, and to the deathly toll of war.

Two postwar publications by photographers George N. Barnard and Alexander Gardner, Brady's large collection of glass negatives, a huge military archive, and thousands of soldiers' portraits remain part of the Civil War's photographic legacy. Only in 1888, when inventor George Eastman introduced roll film (made of celluloid, a synthetic plastic) and a simple box camera, the Kodak, did members of the general public, until then primarily viewers of photography, become photographers themselves.