PORTRAITS OF SLAVE CHILDREN, in History of Photography: An International Quarterly, Volume 9 No.3 (July--Sept. 1985, pp. 187--210) by Kathleen Collins. In this important journal article, Dr. Collins begins with a group of carte de visite photographs, noting they have been "something of a puzzle to photographic collectors and historians." Dr. Collins illustrates more than two dozen examples showing emancipated slave children from New Orleans. She describes the historical milieu: the creation of the first free public schools in Louisiana by Gen. N. P. Banks (1863); the recruiting by missionary and abolitionist groups of Northern women as teachers; the desire to use photographs as both anti-slavery propaganda and as a fund-raising tool. Dr. Collins concludes:
"These visual mementos remain as evidence of a social reform campaign which was widely discussed and supported among abolitionists at the time. Ten years after their establishment, support for the schools had dwindled, and the campaign ended. Now, among Northern collections large and small may be found these enigmatic portraits of Caucasion-featured children who, because of their 'whiteness,' could stimulate their Northern benefactors to contribute to the future of a race to which these children found themselves arbitrarily confined."
GETTYSBURG: A JOURNEY IN TIME by William A. Frassanito (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1975). Although the book's dust jacket indicates Frassanito did his graduate work in American cultural history, his research makes a key contribution to the art history of Civil War photographs. Many art historians have tended to belittle Civil War photographs as purely documentary in intent, and thus not a significant factor in the study of photography as a medium of creative expression. But William A. Frassanito's careful research shows conclusively that one of Alexander Gardner's most famous photographs, "A Sharpshooter's Last Sleep," takes considerable liberties with the truth: a Confederate soldier's body was lugged, apparently by the photographers, some 40 yards uphill to the Devil's Den to be re-photographed in a dramatic composition. This staging was evidently conducted for purely aesthetic reasons, as the documentary value of the photograph would otherwise be limited to its representation of a significant battlefield landscape. Frassanito further notes, "Judging from where the body was found, it is doubtful that the soldier was actually a sharpshooter, but instead an ordinary infantryman, killed while advancing up the slope." (p. 187) Of course, these artistic liberties were likely taken in the search for a "truer" representation of the battlefield. But they remind us that Gardner's magnum opus carries a title straight out of the world of the fine arts: The Photographic Sketch Book of the War.
Professional Anthropological Associations
Society for Imaging Science and Technology
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Author
|
Title
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Publisher
|
Year
|
|
Brady, Matthew and Webb Garrison, Ed.
|
Brady's Civil War
|
The Lyons Press
|
2000
|
|
Davis, William C., Ed. and William A. Frassanito,
Photographer
|
Touched by Fire: A National Historical Society
Photographic Portrait of the Civil War, in Association With Civil War
Times
|
Black Dog & Leventhal Pub.
|
1997
|
|
Katz, Mark D.
|
Witness to an Era: The Life and Photographs of
Alexander Gardner: The Civil War, Lincoln, and the West
|
Rutledge Hill Press
|
1999
|
|
Sullivan, George
|
Portraits of War: Civil War Photographers and Their
Work
|
Millbrook Press
|
1998
|
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