The Brutality of War

"Federal Dead on the Field of Battle of First Day, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania"
Mathew Brady, 1863

In the time of Matthew Brady, photography was scarcely a matter of pointing one's camera, pressing a button, and later uploading one's pictures to one's computer. Rather it was an arduous process which require not just a horse-drawn-cart full of hundreds of pounds of tools, noxious chemicals and developing plates, but a lot of one's time and money. Brady, a well established gentleman, making a living taking photos of American elites, chose to give up his comfortable way of life to take an astound 7,000 photographs of the bloodiest and most tragic war of American History- the Civil War.

The Civil War was not only a war against North and South but rather a war which pitted family against family, brother against brother. At the core of the Civil War was a fundamental conflict between the ways of life of North and South.  Fought over the ability to hold slaves, and representation in congress, both sides felt noble and just in fighting. This fight they fought under the belief their ways of life would be preserved. Some felt heroic in joining the fray.

And such heroic sentiments an American populace can easily hold for a war which one cannot see. Ultimately, the horrific photos of the mangled dead strewn across a ravaged Earth demonstrated to Americans then and now that war itself is ignoble, destructive, and a plague. The photo above demonstrates this. The scale and terrible intensity of the incorrigibly pernicious war are testified by the innumerability of human corpses. As far as the eye can see, men lie dead and bloodied. They are not martyrs, or larger than life heroes, they are simply anonymous victims. However noble one's beliefs may be leading into battle, there is no questioning the tragedy and horror of its aftermath. And for the first time, through Brady's work, could Americans see it.

Thus Brady's photography made victim the misled notion held by so many Americans that war can be glorious. Watergate is to politics as this image is to war. Photography is indiscriminative. The cold soulless view of a camera lens makes no room for bias that the hairs of a painters brush so often do. Photography can show no majestic Washington leading troops into a frenzied but righteous battle. The advent of photography, still much in its infancy at the time of the Civil War, awoke a nation who had never seen war for what it truly was. This is the first example of the raw power of photography irrevocably changing the way a nation sees itself. No matter how much the process of photography may be expedited, its impact will never lessen.