Civil War photos raised familiar questions about war dead

Every day we are bombarded with images of violence and conflict. And every day we have to judge which are acceptable as legitimate journalism, which are propaganda and which are merely voyeurism. Do we look - or avert our gaze? A new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, shows these questions are not new.

In 1862 Alexander Gardner, a commercial photographer, packed his camera and darkroom into his "war wagon" and travelled to view the aftermath of Sharpsburg.

There, 23,000 Americans had been killed, wounded or missing in the worst single day of fighting of the US Civil War. The photos Gardner took were shown in a New York exhibition called The Dead of Antietam.

"They were a galvanising, shocking moment for the public at the time," says National Portrait Gallery senior curator David Ward.

The largest display of photographs by Gardner are now being shown at the gallery as part of exhibition Dark Field of the Republic.

"It brought home to Americans the reality of industrial war," Ward says.

"This was a dark, bloody business that involved mass casualties that people were totally unprepared for both psychologically and medically."

But in the 19th Century people could - and did - buy them from the studios of Gardner and Brady.

"This is where you run into the troubling element, that photography introduces a degree of voyeurism or even prurience," says Ward. "It was a violent time, but this allowed you to look at it in your home. This is the beginning of the media and visual revolution that we are heir to today with the internet."

But it was also one of the few ways that the public could gain first-hand knowledge of warfare.

"To think of it purely as commercialising (violence) seems wrong because it was a source of information," says Bibiana Obler, an expert in modern and visual culture at George Washington University. "It's not like they would hang them on the wall and say look at these beautiful images of death. They had collections of these images, but it was more like surfing the internet and looking at newspapers."

But a year later at Gettysburg, Gardner over-reached. Anxious to follow up the commercial success of the Dead of Antietam, he pulled the corpse of a Confederate soldier from a burial line and moved it to the Devil's Den, a more dramatic location and scene of savage fighting.

What's more, he concocted a narrative, misidentifying the infantryman as a rebel sharpshooter and describing his death in lyrical terms.

"It is something that is deeply troubling and even immoral," says Ward.

"He wants to make money and he wants to repeat the sensationalism of the Antietam pictures. And people took it at face value. It was seen as fact and truth when it was anything but. It was a staged, theatrical recreation of something that never existed and that is profoundly troubling."

The fraud was not unmasked until the 20th Century when the image was scientifically analysed.

"Ever since then there has been this concern about whether photography is absolutely true. In an ironic way we have to thank Gardner because he raises the question about how much truth there is in photography."

Official war photography made its debut at the Crimean War in the 1850s. But the photographs of Roger Fenton lack the brutal realism that marks the work of Gardner, who is widely credited with being the first modern war photographer.

And his work also marks the turning point in political awareness of the power of such images to shape public opinion.

Abraham Lincoln himself may have been influenced by Gardner's work, according to Ward. A regular visitor to Gardner's studio to have his portrait taken, it is almost certain that he saw the Dead of Antietam.

By the 20th Century photography had been firmly established as a propaganda tool. The feminist writer Virginia Woolf argued for public dissemination of images of dead children during the Spanish Civil War to gain support for the Republican side.

President Franklin Roosevelt gave special permission for the release of a graphic film depicting the US Marines at Tarawa during World War Two.

And Vietnam became the first televised conflict, bringing the horror of war into the homes of Americans and ultimately helping to turn public opinion against America's involvement.

"The question is," says Obler, "what is the effect of showing this violence, and what is the effect of not showing it?"

The secrecy of drone strikes and the danger posed to journalists covering conflicts such as Syria have made modern warfare in many ways less visible than the wars of the 19th and 20th Century.

"We are not seeing things, we are not getting any images and that's a problem when various governments are making these decisions not to show things," says Obler.

"But there's the more general problem of how true do you want this to be?" adds Ward.

"Do you want images of the dead and dying in your living room, either on television or in still photographs? There's a broader cultural issue, particularly when it comes to service people, how close do we want to get? And this goes back to Gardner. He raises all these questions at the very dawn of photography."