Frank Schell

Transcription

[Music plays] 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