Civil War Photography Essay

This image depicts a lone rebel sharpshooter strewn dead among a vantage point behind boulders has been painstakingly proven to be a staged image, the soldier is dead but there is proof that Gardner and O'Sullivan moved the man's body to the place that he image depicts to have a better scene. The collodion process allowing for multiple printing of clear, crisp images greatly increased the range of photography to be spread around. Roger Fenton taking images of the Crimean war, and of the many photographs throughout the American civil war, these are only two examples of how because the collodion process allowed for multiple prints to be made of these images the public eye for the time could get a real sense of what was going on, on the battlefields …show more content…
The photographers are taking exposures of things like the wars previously talked about, but also they are taking photographs of nature and man made scenes throughout the world. American photographers like Timothy O’Sullivan, William Henry Jackson and Edward Antony were heading to the west with government surveys, documenting the lands that helped America developed a sense of cultural based in the expansive landscape that was so abundant in America. Across the world photographers also spread out, people traveled to the orient, and to Egypt making images that those from the west had never seen. This new abundance of photographic prints was something that allowed the normal household to have a respectable collection of prints that ranged from family portraits in the form of carte-de-visites and tintype portraits to a more scrapbook like collection of images from around the world, and the families would also have a collection of stereoscopic cards that allowed, with the aid of a stereo viewer, an early three-dimensional illusion created by taking a photograph from a camera with two lenses, then using a special stereo viewer that separated a person's binocular vision allowing a three dimensional illusion to be