A Relative and Proper Order: Death and Illness in the Photography of the American Civil War

Zoe Trodd (Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA)

My paper examines how Civil War photography represented mortality, wounds, illness and death, against the backdrop of changing attitudes towards time and history in the nineteenth century. The two great image-texts of the period, Barnard’s Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign and Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the Civil War, had to confront the national cult of memory and interest in death, and somehow offer temporal continuity where the discontinuity of illness and death loomed.

Like nineteenth century historians, Barnard and Gardner turned to narrative to reassert ideas of progress and Manifest Destiny. Their modes of visual emplotment embody philosophies of history, and they use sequencing to control the disruption of history by war. Their narratives also resist the idea of the wounded or ill body: in a tight grammar of seeing they insist upon a relentless forward movement that works, machine-like, against fragility and mortality.

They express disruptive pain and illness as the clue or trace within their narratives, so incorporating evidence of damage to bodies and land into a cause-and-effect narrative. In connecting the body’s wounds to the battle-ravaged land, they acknowledge the post-lapsarian American in his despoiled Eden, and connect nineteenth century landscape hermaneutics to the debate on the body and mortality.

My paper establishes the visual grammar of the album by close-reading five images. I briefly set them in the context of nineteenth century visual culture, attitudes toward mortality, and philosophies of history, and I show how they resist the traditional photographic arrest of time, so challenging the memento mori mode of photography. In these two image-texts, the life of the body and the story of the nation rediscover their “relative and proper order”.