Studio Art : Photography and The American Civil War; DBQ-Type Written

Portfolio Project

All photographic artwork and information in this instructional

material is taken from the Metropolitan Museum of Art Website. Please refer to the website for sizes. All of the

photographs were made in the the printing process using egg albumen and silver halide crystals taken from a glass plate

negative.

Select four of the photographs from the recent Metropolitan Museum Exhibition and write your personal essay in your own words. Use the rubric as a tool to assess your progress. Write a comparison and contrast of at least four of the

photographs that I have provided for your analysis and further research. You may want to try to structure the comparison and contrast essay in a similar fashion as a “Document Based Question” Essay is structured on the Global Regents Exam and

consider questions such as the following:

•  What do you see in each image?; What is compelling about each one? •  What do you think that the artists were trying to show to the viewer? •  Did they want the viewer to come away with ideas about the time during the

Civil War? •  How many Civil War era contemporary issues does each photograph represent

for you as a viewer? •  Do you have feelings that may be visceral before those that are your

intellectual thoughts when you examine these photographic artworks (because of their content that is often brutal Realism).

Sojourner Truth, "I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance”, Unknown, American, 1864

Born Isabella Baumfree to a family of slaves in Ulster County, New York, Sojourner Truth sits for one of the war’s most iconic portraits in an anonymous photographer’s studio, likely in Detroit. The sixty-seven-year-old abolitionist, who never learned to read or write, pauses from her knitting and looks pensively at the camera. She was not only an antislavery activist and colleague of Frederick Douglass but also a memoirist and committed feminist, who shows herself engaged in the dignity of women’s work. More than most sitters, Sojourner Truth is both the actor in the picture’s drama and its author, and she used the card mount to promote and raise money for her many causes: I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance. SOJOURNER TRUTH."The imprint on the verso features the sitter’s statement in bright red ink as well as a Michigan 1864 copyright in her name. By owning control of her image, her “shadow,” Sojourner Truth could sell it. In so doing she became one of the era’s most progressive advocates for slaves and freedmen after Emancipation, for women’s suffrage, and for the medium of photography. At a human-rights convention, Sojourner Truth commented that she “used to be sold for other people’s benefit, but now she sold herself for her own.”

Pennsylvania Light Artillery, Battery B, Petersburg Virginia Timothy H. O'Sullivan  (American, born Ireland, 1840–1882), 1864 Civil War photographers were most effective at chronicling things that did not move, such as heavy mortars, bridges, tents, and ruins—subjects that cameras had more or less successfully recorded since the medium’s birth twenty years earlier. The essential problem for a war photographer interested in frontline drama was not lack of daring but the long times (two to five seconds depending on the amount of sun) required to properly expose a large-format collodion-on-glass negative typically used in the field. Here, in Petersburg, Virginia, Timothy H. O’Sullivan attempted something extraordinary for the period—an action shot. Whether or not Battery B was truly under fire or just drilling is moot, as the photograph is a welcome exception that offers a lyrical view of the poetics of battlefield artillery.

The Scourged Back Attributed to McPherson & Oliver  (American, active New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1860s) This artwork is part of Photography!and the American Civil War Gordon, a runaway slave seen with severe whipping scars in this haunting carte-de-visite portrait, is one of the many African Americans whose lives Sojourner Truth endeavored to better. Perhaps the most famous of all known Civil War–era portraits of slaves, the photograph dates from March or April 1863 and was made in a camp of Union soldiers along the Mississippi River, where the subject took refuge after escaping his bondage on a nearby Mississippi plantation.##On Saturday, July 4, 1863, this portrait and two others of Gordon appeared as wood engravings in a special Independence Day feature in Harper’s Weekly. McPherson & Oliver’s portrait and Gordon’s narrative in the newspaper were extremely popular, and photography studios throughout the North (including Mathew B. Brady’s) duplicated and sold prints of The Scourged Back. Within months, the carte de visite had secured its place as an early example of the wide dissemination of ideologically abolitionist photographs.

This view of a slave pen in Alexandria guarded, ironically, by Union officers shows Russell at his most insightful; the pen had been converted by the Union Army into a prison for captured Confederate soldiers. Between 1830 and 1836, at the height of the American cotton market, the District of Columbia, which at that time included Alexandria, Virginia, was considered the seat of the slave trade. The most infamous and successful firm in the capital was Franklin & Armfield, whose slave pen is shown here under a later owner's name. Three to four hundred slaves were regularly kept on the premises in large, heavily locked cells for sale to Southern plantation owners. According to a note by Alexander Gardner, who published a similar view, "Before the war, a child three years old, would sell in Alexandria, for about fifty dollars, and an able-bodied man at from one thousand to eighteen hundred dollars. A woman would bring from five hundred to fifteen hundred dollars, according to her age and personal attractions.” Late in the 1830s Franklin and Armfield, already millionaires from the profits they had made, sold out to George Kephart, one of their former agents. Although slavery was outlawed in the District in 1850, it flourished across the Potomac in Alexandria.

Slave Pen, Alexandria, Virginia, Andrew Joseph Russell  (American, 1830–1902), 1863 Better known for his later views commissioned by the Union Pacific Railroad, A. J. Russell, a captain in the 141st New York Infantry Volunteers, was one of the few Civil War photographers who was also a soldier. As a photographer-engineer for the U.S. Military Railroad Construction Corps, Russell's duty was to make a historical record of both the technical accomplishments of General Herman Haupt's engineers and the battlefields and camp sites in Virginia.

A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Timothy H. O'Sullivan  (American, born Ireland, 1840–1882), July. 1863 This photograph of the rotting dead awaiting burial after the Battle of Gettysburg is perhaps the best-known Civil War landscape. It was published in Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (1866), the nation’s first anthology of photographs. The Sketch Book features ten photographic plates of Gettysburg—eight by Timothy H. O’Sullivan, who served as a field operator for Alexander Gardner, and two by Gardner himself. The extended caption that accompanies this photograph is among Gardner’s most poetic: "It was, indeed, a ‘harvest of death.’ . . . Such a picture conveys a useful moral: It shows the blank horror and reality of war, in opposition to its pageantry. Here are the dreadful details! Let them aid in preventing such another calamity falling upon the nation."

Wilson, Branded Slave from New Orleans Charles Paxson (American, active New York, 1860s), 1863 On January 30, 1864, to fan the anti-slavery cause and promote the sale of abolitionist photographs, Harper’s Weekly published this carte de visite and three others as wood engravings. The newspaper also included stirring bibliographies of the emancipated slaves. The editors noted that Wilson Chinn was about sixty years old. His former master, Volsey B. Marmillion, a sugar planter near New Orleans, “was accustomed to brand his negroes, and Wilson has on his forehead the letters ‘V.B.M.’”

I don’t know the author’s source for the following. ‘Wilson Chin (sic) was about 60 years old at the time of this photo. … When he was 21 years, he was taken down the river and sold to Volsey B. Marmillion, a sugar grower. This man traditionally branded his slaves, and Wilson Chin illustrates this brand of “VBM” on his forehead. Of the 210 slaves that lived on this plantation, 105 left at one time and Came into the union camp. Thirty of them had been branded like cattle with a hot iron, four of them on their forehead and the others on the breast or arm.”

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The research below is from the following website :

Private Samuel Shoop, Company F, 200th Pennsylvania Infantry, Reed Brockway Bontecou  (American, 1824–1907), April–May 1865 The last great battle of the Civil War was the siege of Petersburg, Virginia—a brutal campaign that led to Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865. Samuel Shoop, a twenty-five-year-old private in Company F of the 200th Pennsylvania Volunteers, received a gunshot wound in the thigh at Fort Steadman on the first day of the campaign (March 25) and was evacuated to Harewood Hospital in Washington, D.C. His leg was amputated by Dr. Reed Brockway Bontecou, surgeon in charge, who also made this clinical photograph. It was intended, in part, to serve as a tool for teaching fellow army surgeons and is an extremely rare example of the early professional use of photography in America.