It always catches me a little off guard when I find out the picture on social media doesn’t match the life behind it. I should know better by now, but I still pause. “Really?” I say, genuinely surprised that the entirety of this person’s life, the complex nuances, the minutia of existence with all its highs and lows, wins and losses is not actually captured in a heavily edited and filtered square image 851 pixels wide. I blink, adjusting to the sensation of what feels like an optical illusion sliding away. The vase is really the profile of an old woman; the pinpricks of stars and circles is actually an elephant. This is life now, a series of mental calibrations set to the tune of that Talking Heads song: This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife! Am I right? Am I wrong?
None of this is new. It is, as the song says, same as it ever was.
Painting once dominated the representational turf. Photography showed up in the 1830s, took one look at that big, glossy portrait that took some broke-ass artist the better part of a year to paint and said, “hold my beer.” Earliest photographers positioned the new medium as “realer than real.” This machine, the camera, produced an astonishingly true rendering of what existed—a landscape, a person, or a bowl of fruit (yes, even in 1842 we were obsessed with food pics)—better than any human ever could! Heady stuff. Predictably this caused a great collective scowl among artists. Impassioned debate ensued about how this would be, like, the total end of, like, painting, and like everything! Pump the brakes, Delacroix. Your job isn’t going anywhere. And this whole notion that the camera is some objective, god-like, truth-bringing tool was always laughable. A wizard stands behind the curtain making choices that not only capture what’s seen, but to also shape what we see. File under: with a great lens comes great responsibility.
This was first put to the test when the Civil War broke out. Alexander Gardner was a photographer who worked under the famous Mathew B. Brady. Brady had already risen to prominence in the 1840s for his photographic portraits of luminaries such as Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and Abraham Lincoln. When the war gathered steam, Brady shifted his business to making cartes de viste, essentially wallet-sized images, of soldiers departing for service. For Brady, it was short leap from studio to the battlefield, a move he later said he felt compelled to make on a moral level. He created a kind of “mobile studio and darkroom” and petitioned the president to allow his photographers to work on site capturing the horrifying lived realities of war.
Gardner was a prolific photographer credited with taking more photos of the war than Brady or any of his fellow camera men (and, PS, they were all dudes because patriarchy and who else was going to smuggle spy intel back and forth in their petticoats?). Gardner was behind the shocking images of the Battle of Antietam, one of the war’s most gruesome events. He also brought images of the historic Gettysburg battle straight to the broken hearts and terrified minds of the American people. One picture in particular seemed to epitomize the tragedy and anguish of the ongoing conflict. It depicted a deceased Rebel “sharp shooter,” splayed on his back with his face turned slightly in profile. His useless rifle abandoned near his head; his Confederate-issued cap discarded as if tossed down in victory even as the photograph trumpets the ultimate defeat.
Looking at this image today with our historical backlog of war imagery and the urgently present pictures of the Ukraine conflict only a click away, the emotion is no less blunted. A young man is dead. He was someone’s son, someone’s brother, likely someone’s father and husband. The thread of life snipped with the casualness of a seamstress removing an errant stitch. More than a century later Gardner’s image is no less galvanizing than it was on the day it was made.
In 1975 historian William Frassantino revisited Gardner’s images and noticed that the same body appeared in different places among six other photographs; Gardner’s iconic “sharp shooter” photograph was staged.
From an article in The Washington Post:
When Gardner and his assistants Timothy O’Sullivan and James F. Gibson reached Gettysburg shortly after the terrible battle there, most of the dead soldiers were either buried or decomposing.
So when the photographers spotted the intact corpse of a young Confederate near a part of the battlefield called the Devil’s Den, they took full advantage. After shooting photos of the soldier where he had fallen, they appear to have put his body on a blanket, and lugged it to a more photogenic location. The photographers placed the soldier against the backdrop of a stone fortification, probably turned his head toward the camera, and leaned a rifle beside him for maximum effect.
Gardner considered himself an artist. He held the beliefs shared by others evolving photography that it was acceptable to compose in the same way that painters arranged elements for their scenes. Moreover, Gardner knew the impact of these photographs, their emotional and political heft. Historians have largely given Gardner a pass by citing all or some of these assessments, making sure to note that the ethics in play here are, at best, shabby, but, hey, consider the context. So that settles that.
Authenticity has always been hard to come by, but a quality we continue to chase and prize. It’s worth thinking about not only in relation to what we present as our “real” lives, but in regards to our work as artists and creatives. Was Gardner right or wrong in what he did is not the question that interests me. I ask myself, would I make the same choice in pursuit of telling the most compelling story I could? Photography is one of the only mediums originally predicated on truth and immediacy and accuracy. The stakes are simply higher than in other art forms, the risk of indelible harm greater, and the possibility of making a world-changing positive impact, for better or worse, almost too alluring to ignore.
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