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WARTIME PHOTOGRAPHY

IN THE 1850S NEW PHOTOGRAPHIC PROCESSES MADE PRODUCING PICTURES less expensive and allowed multiple prints to be made. Photography became a more flexible and accessible medium, enabling many people during the Civil War to obtain portraits of friends and family members and visualize the conflict by collecting prints of leading figures and landmarks.

The camera is the eye of history.

MATHEW BRADY

 

By 1861 the daguerreotype process—which typically involved exposure times of fifteen seconds or more and produced images on silver-coated copper plates that could not be reproduced—had largely given way to the wet collodion process. A viscous solution produced by dissolving guncotton in ether and alcohol, collodion could be poured onto a glass plate, which was then immersed in silver nitrate to make it light sensitive and inserted into a camera like the one shown here, with a cap over the lens to prevent exposure. The photograph had to be taken while the collodion was still wet, but the exposure time was reduced to several seconds, which was not quick enough to portray people in motion without blurring the image but did eliminate the need for long poses. The image on the glass plate was a negative, which the photographer could keep or discard by scraping off the collodion. Glass negatives were used to print positive images on albumen paper (coated with a light-sensitive mixture including egg whites) or were placed against a dark background to produce ambrotypes, which appeared positive. Collodion could also be poured onto iron plates, used to produce tintypes—positive images that required no printing. Itinerant photographers who turned out quick, inexpensive portraits for soldiers and civilians favored tintypes. Other photographers who visited camps and battlefields produced glass negatives, which they sent to studios for printing. Advances in equipment and technology enabled photographers to venture out and capture great events as they unfolded. In the words of Mathew Brady, the camera was now “the eye of history.” STP

 

FIELD CAMERA Although large and cumbersome by today’s standards, field cameras and lenses like those at left let photography move outside of the studio and into the landscape, allowing for the creation of images seared into our collective memories. The wet-plate collodian process required wet and dry chemicals and processing trays to prepare the plates and develop the negatives. Photographers also needed plenty of water onsite.