Alan Trachtenberg’s
“‘Albums of War’: On
Reading Civil War
Photographs”
Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011
“The mere notation of photography, when
we introduce it into our meditation on the
genesis of historical knowledge and its
true value, suggests this simple question:
COULD SUCH AND SUCH A FACT, AS IT IS
NARRATED, HAVE BEEN
PHOTOGRAPHED?”
 How do photographs shape what we call
“memories” and what we call
“knowledge”?

Valéry’s “innocent seeming”
question



Mathew B. Brady, with whose name the entire
project of photographing the Civil War has long
been identified, “was more an entrepreneur than
a photographer, the proprietor of fashionable
galleries in Washington and New York”
(Trachtenberg 289).
Brady and the manager of his Washington
gallery, Alexander Gardener, quarreled over who
should receive credit for the photographs signed
“Brady” (as Brady himself was not the
cameraman).
“It can be said that whoever may have authored
Brady’s images, ‘Brady’ authorized them, gave
them imprimateur” (289). SEE FIG. 1.
One particular red herring: Brady
as photographer

“The inventorial form was, of course, neither
Brady’s invention nor unique to his practice;
it was simply the most obvious, even ‘natural’
way to list such images. The very
obviousness of the form is precisely what
makes it at once so potent as a vehicle of
cultural meaning and so hard for us to
see…The catalog empowers the image, then,
not as picture but as datum, an item of
sequential regularity” (Trachtenberg 291).
See FIG. 2.
The inventorial form and cultural
meaning
Technological change leading up to the Civil
War
 Exposure time reduced in wet-plate
production process, enabling stop-action
representations of moving scenes
 Negative-positive process enables
reproduction of unlimited numbers of images
from individual negatives
 Stereographs introduce three-dimensionality
as a new condition of viewing images,
“mak[ing] them seem virtual simulacra of the
perceptible world” (Trachtenberg 292).
Detail in such “frightful amount”
Trachtenberg’s subjects:
 Gardener’s Photographic Sketchbook of the Civil War
(Alexander Gardener, 1866)
 Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign (George P.
Barnard, 1866)
 Photographs Illustrative of Operations in Construction and
Transportation (manual written by Herman Haupt, with
photographs by A.J. Russell, 1863)
The dilemma: How can such albums manage to depict war as a
felt event in everyday life when the medium through which
they’re communicating values, more than anything else,
“keeping a record”? (The larger dilemma still presents itself in
the practice of “serious photography,” thought to be antipictorial, representing detail indiscriminately and drawing from
an archival base.)
The album and the construction of
narrative
Trachtenberg’s conclusion about Holmes’ “The
Doings of the Sunbeam” (a companion piece
to “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph”):
“[I]n the essay as a whole Holmes virtually
diagrams a process of self-blinding, of seeing
and forgetting, repressing and displacing,
that is a sign of ideology…[the photos]
seeming to be without mediation being
precisely the message of an ideology…”
(298).
In the “honest sunshine”: Oliver
Wendell Holmes and the ideology of the
photo
Review the images from Gardener’s album
(figures 4-8), his “tour” of the war. Then,
consider Trachtenberg’s question:
“Are these photographic constructions free, then,
of the difficulties experienced by Holmes and
apprehended by Whitman—difficulties arising
from the antithetical character of the war itself,
its fissure we can think of as sundering not only
hearthstones but also livid details of war from
overarching ideologies, from containing
narratives?”
 How do texts (captions, essays, and full texts)
place interpretive demands on images?

“The real war will never get in the
books” – Whitman, Specimen Days


On Thursday, we’ll focus more closely on
Whitman’s account of the Civil War in Specimen
Days (1892) and his reflection on a more
industrialized, post-war America in Democratic
Vistas (1871).
You should also look at the frontispieces
Whitman used in various editions of Leaves of
Grass and consider how the self-portraits he
chose placed interpretive demands on his text
(specifically, a poem like “Song of Myself”) as
well as how the text places demands on the
portraits:
http://www.whitmanarchive.org/published/index.
html
For next time…