Photography and the Civil War:

Given our concern on this site with representations of the injured body, (and given the visual facility of the Internet and the widespread presumption that photographs are immediately legible), it is particularly important to approach photographs of the wounded of the Civil War with care and thought. At mid-century, the photograph was relatively new, exciting, powerful, and unfamiliar, and such writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, as well as Whitman wrote about the advent of this new media.

More recently Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, and Alan Trachtenberg have written about the power, politics, and ideology of photography. Sontag claims that no photograph can give us ethical or political knowledge but only sentimental views, and Walter Benjamin cautioned that photographs must come with captions that direct the viewer's gaze and thoughts if they are to serve any political purpose.

So, look at the photographs below carefully. We were careful to select images of injured bodies rather than dead bodies. Interestingly, images of the wounded are not as readily found as images of the dead, in part because of technological limitations, but also because the dead are more easily turned into metaphors while the wounded resist memorializing gestures. Indeed, most Civil War photographs of the devastation of war are of dead bodies, and usually of intact bodies. Photographs of the hospitals where the wounded and sick were present in large numbers are primarily of attendants and buildings. (See Timothy Sweet, Traces of War: Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of the Union, 109).

photo facts	URL: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pnp/cwp/4a39000/4a39500/4a39532u.tif
Confederate wounded at Smith's Barn, with Dr. Anson Hurd, 14th Indiana Volunteers, in attendance. Vicinity at Keedysville, MD.
	URL: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pnp/cwp/4a40000/4a40100/4a40154u.tif
Zouave ambulance crew demonstrating removal of wounded soldiers from the field; unknown location.
	URL: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pnp/cwp/4a39000/4a39700/4a39713u.tif
Wounded from the Battle of the Wilderness; Fredericksburg, VA
	URL: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pnp/cwp/4a39000/4a39600/4a39627u.tif
Patients in ward of Harewood Hospital; Washington, D.C.
	URL: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pnp/cwp/4a40000/4a40200/4a40251u.tif
Hospital tents in rear of Douglass Hospital, Washington, D.C.