Gardner and Brady's Photos & Allen's Postcards

During the Civil War, Gardner and Brady, two photographers from the North, set out to capture the essence of the Civil War and convey it to American citizens in the Northeast. Given  that the photographic technology and techniques were still fairly rudimentary, Gardner and Brady were limited in their ability to present an accurate representation of what Civil War battles actually looked and felt like. These constraints, namely the long time it took to capture an image and the immobility of the equipment, lead Gardner and Brady to present a more stylized vision of the Civil War to the rest of the nation. Many of the photographs taken before the Civil War were merely commodifications of soldiers in their uniforms. Gardner and Brady's could not capture the chaos, bloodshed, and massive scale of the war’s battle, and instead depicted the eerily quiet landscapes of the front, dotted with corpses, smoke, and the occasional heap of rubble, after the battles had already come to pass. These images were disturbing, of course, but were a far cry away from conveying to the public the actual nature of the war.

Many of the photographs romanticized life on the front. The photographs of the soldiers in camp often depicted clean and picturesque living conditions, as well as soldiers engaging in recreational activities like sports and church services. As with any selection of photographs, it is worth noting what subjects were left out of the images. Gardner and Brady’s series, for instance, did not include any images of black Americans, and there are only a few inclusions of women into the photos. Both groups were instrumental in the war effort and were often in camp with the soldiers, yet are not featured prominently in Gardner and Brady’s representation of the war. Clearly, Gardner and Brady were selling a stylized story of the Civil War. Their photographs of military camps and of the battle fields conveyed a more idealized, and softened image of the war to the public. There are no images that capture the squalor and unhygienic conditions that were rampant in the military camps. The battlefield images were often staged too, with Gardner and Brady situating objects and bodies in the frame. 

James Allen’s series of postcards of the lynching of African American in the post war South provides its viewers with much more visceral and disturbing images of violence than Gardner and Brady’s war photographs do. Many of Allen’s postcards solely show the victim hanging from a tree. Others depict an entire lynch mob surrounding their target. Many of the lynch mob participants are shown smiling and formally dressed. Whether depicted alone or surrounded by a throng of white Southerners, the images are equally harrowing and evoke a sense of terror and disgust from the viewers. Allen’s postcards, however, were not meant to be viewed as acts of terror, and instead were seen as novelties. Lynchings were, at the time, seen in the South as legitimate acts of vigilantism. Local law enforcement agents were often complicit with the lynch mobs, and even if they weren’t, there was rarely, if ever, any action taken to condemn the individuals who committed the murder of African Americans.