Alan Trachtenberg’s Alan Trachtenberg’s “‘Albums of War’: On “‘Albums of War’: On
Reading Civil War Reading Civil War Photographs”Photographs”
Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011
Valéry’s “innocent seeming” Valéry’s “innocent seeming” questionquestion
“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”?
One particular red herring: Brady One particular red herring: Brady as photographeras photographer
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.
The inventorial form and cultural The inventorial form and cultural meaningmeaning
“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.
Detail in such “frightful amount”Detail in such “frightful amount”
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).
The album and the construction of The album and the construction of narrativenarrative
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 anti-pictorial, representing detail indiscriminately and drawing from an archival base.)
In the “honest sunshine”: Oliver In the “honest sunshine”: Oliver Wendell Holmes and the ideology of Wendell Holmes and the ideology of
the photothe photo
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).
““The real war will never get in the The real war will never get in the books” – Whitman, books” – Whitman, Specimen DaysSpecimen Days
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?
For next time…For next time…
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