Script:
Listen to part of a lecture in a United States history class.
The battle at Antietam Creek in 1862 was the bloodiest twenty -four hours of the Civil War. Nearly 8,000 men lost their lives and another 15,000 were severely wounded. No single day in American history has been as tragic. Antietam was memorable in another way, too—it saw the advent of the war photographer.
The best known pictorial records of the Civil War are the photographs commissioned by Mathew Brady, a leading portrait photographer of the lime. Brady owned studios in New York and in Washington, and was known for his portraits of political leaders and celebrities. At the outbreak of the Civil War, he turned his attention to the conflict. He wanted to document the war on a grand scale, so he hired twenty photographers and sent them into the field with the troops. The battlefield carried dangers and financial risks, but Brady was persistent.
Brady himself did not actually shoot many of the photographs that bore his name. His company of photographers took the vast majority of the pictures—images of camp life, artillery, fortifications, railroads, bridges, battlefields, officers, and ordinary soldiers. Brady was more of a project manager. He spent his time supervising his photographers, preserving their negatives, and buying negatives from other photographers.
Two days after I he battle at Antietam. Two photographers from Brady′s New York gallery took a series of photographs that ushered in a new era in the visual documentation of war. This was the first time that cameras had been allowed near the action before the fallen bodies of the dead were removed. Within a month of the battle, the images of battlefield corpses from Antietam were on display at Brady’s gallery in New York. A sign on the door said simply, "The Dead of Antietam.” America was shocked. The exhibition marked the first time most people had ever seen the carnage of the war. The photographs had a sensational impact, opening people’s eyes as no woodcuts or lithographs had ever done.
The New York Times wrote. “If Mr. Brady has not brought bodies and laid them in our door yards, he has done something very like it." Thousands of people, especially mothers and wives of men serving in the Union forces, flocked to look at these first dramatic images of death and destruction. Suddenly the battlefield was no longer comfortably distant—the camera was bringing it closer, erasing romantic notions about war.
Mathew Brady’s work was the first instance of the comprehensive photo- documentation of a war the Civil War—which as a result became the first media war. Photography had come of age. although it was still a relatively new technology with several limitations. For example, the exposure lime of the camera was slow, and negatives had to be prepared minutes before a shot and developed immediately afterwards. This meant «hat it was not possible for photographers to lake action pictures. They were limited to taking pictures of the battlefield after the fighting was over. Another limitation was that newspapers couldn’t yet reproduce photographs. They could print only artists’ drawings of the scene. Nevertheless, photography made a huge impact, and media coverage of war—and public opinion about war—would never be the same again.