Alan Trachtenberg

1
Alan Trachtenbergs Albums of War On Reading
Civil War Photographs

• Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011

2
Valérys innocent seeming question

• The mere notation of photography, when we
  introduce it into our meditation on the genesis
  of historical knowledge and its true value,
  suggests this simple question COULD SUCH AND
  SUCH A FACT, AS IT IS NARRATED, HAVE BEEN
  PHOTOGRAPHED?
• How do photographs shape what we call memories
  and what we call knowledge?

3
One particular red herring Brady as photographer

• Mathew B. Brady, with whose name the entire
  project of photographing the Civil War has long
  been identified, was more an entrepreneur than a
  photographer, the proprietor of fashionable
  galleries in Washington and New York
  (Trachtenberg 289).
• Brady and the manager of his Washington gallery,
  Alexander Gardener, quarreled over who should
  receive credit for the photographs signed Brady
  (as Brady himself was not the cameraman).
• It can be said that whoever may have authored
  Bradys images, Brady authorized them, gave
  them imprimateur (289). SEE FIG. 1.

4
The inventorial form and cultural meaning

• The inventorial form was, of course, neither
  Bradys invention nor unique to his practice it
  was simply the most obvious, even natural way
  to list such images. The very obviousness of the
  form is precisely what makes it at once so potent
  as a vehicle of cultural meaning and so hard for
  us to seeThe catalog empowers the image, then,
  not as picture but as datum, an item of
  sequential regularity (Trachtenberg 291). See
  FIG. 2.

5
Detail in such frightful amount

• Technological change leading up to the Civil War
• Exposure time reduced in wet-plate production
  process, enabling stop-action representations of
  moving scenes
• Negative-positive process enables reproduction of
  unlimited numbers of images from individual
  negatives
• Stereographs introduce three-dimensionality as a
  new condition of viewing images, making them
  seem virtual simulacra of the perceptible world
  (Trachtenberg 292).

6
The album and the construction of narrative

• Trachtenbergs subjects
• Gardeners Photographic Sketchbook of the Civil
  War (Alexander Gardener, 1866)
• Photographic Views of Shermans Campaign (George
  P. Barnard, 1866)
• Photographs Illustrative of Operations in
  Construction and Transportation (manual written
  by Herman Haupt, with photographs by A.J.
  Russell, 1863)
• The dilemma How can such albums manage to depict
  war as a felt event in everyday life when the
  medium through which theyre communicating
  values, more than anything else, keeping a
  record? (The larger dilemma still presents
  itself in the practice of serious photography,
  thought to be anti-pictorial, representing detail
  indiscriminately and drawing from an archival
  base.)

7
In the honest sunshine Oliver Wendell Holmes
and the ideology of the photo

• Trachtenbergs conclusion about Holmes The
  Doings of the Sunbeam (a companion piece to The
  Stereoscope and the Stereograph)
• In the essay as a whole Holmes virtually
  diagrams a process of self-blinding, of seeing
  and forgetting, repressing and displacing, that
  is a sign of ideologythe photos seeming to be
  without mediation being precisely the message of
  an ideology (298).

8
The real war will never get in the books
Whitman, Specimen Days

• Review the images from Gardeners album (figures
  4-8), his tour of the war. Then, consider
  Trachtenbergs question
• Are these photographic constructions free, then,
  of the difficulties experienced by Holmes and
  apprehended by Whitmandifficulties arising from
  the antithetical character of the war itself, its
  fissure we can think of as sundering not only
  hearthstones but also livid details of war from
  overarching ideologies, from containing
  narratives?
• How do texts (captions, essays, and full texts)
  place interpretive demands on images?

9
For next time

• On Thursday, well focus more closely on
  Whitmans account of the Civil War in Specimen
  Days (1892) and his reflection on a more
  industrialized, post-war America in Democratic
  Vistas (1871).
• You should also look at the frontispieces Whitman
  used in various editions of Leaves of Grass and
  consider how the self-portraits he chose placed
  interpretive demands on his text (specifically, a
  poem like Song of Myself) as well as how the
  text places demands on the portraits
  http//www.whitmanarchive.org/published/index.html