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Alexander Gardner was a photographer working for Mathew Brady
who came to the battlefield starting 2 days after the battle.
He spent 4 days here
and took about 70 images on plates of glass.
He was the person that had to deal with all the danger
and the trials and tribulations of having a horse-drawn
photographic lab to cart around the countryside
and he took all of the photos that we now have
of the aftermath of the Battle of Antietam.
Gardner's photos, which of course Mathew Brady got the credit for
were the eyeopening images that brought the reality
and the horrors of the battlefield to the noncombatants back home
Before this, war was seen through paintings and sketches
and most of them were kind of glorious images
of grand charges and flags
and to see these mangled bodies
in particularly the rows of dead that appear in some of his images
was shocking to the public- very shocking.
The easiest way to say it is that this is the birth of photojournalism
It's the first time that photographs
of a battlefield before the dead were buried
were scene by anyone
That's when politicians and others
realized the importance of photography.
What I find fascinating is that
on one particular day after the Battle of Antietam
September 19th, 1862
You had on the same portion of the battlefield
That section called the Sunken Road or the Bloody Lane
two men, who were trying to capture images
but doing it in two entirely different ways
You had the artist correspondent
of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, Frank Schell
sitting on a hillside doing a from-life sketch
and then, not too far away
you had Alexander Gardner
with the new technology of photography
capturing Confederate dead in the Sunken Road
before they were pulled out and put in the burial trenches
and I just think that's pretty interesting to see that you had
the old means of recording to be printed in a newspaper
and you have the new technology of photography
both at the same time, on the same day, same place.
It really emotionally had quite an impact.
When that display was put on in New York City
they had the exhibition two weeks after the battle
'The Dead of Antietam'
People were lined up down the street to see it.
Front page news, New York Tribune
One things that the tribune got right
was what the impact was to the families and the people
that were affected by this battle.
People saw what this battle did to their brothers,
their fathers, their sons.
and the best line of all was how the reporter said that
broken hearts cannot be photographed