Alexander Gardner

Alexander Gardner was born in 1821 near Glasgow, Scotland. He emigrated to the United States around 1856 and managed Mathew Brady's Washington, D.C., portrait studio. When the Civil War broke out, he was attached to General McClellan's staff to copy maps and charts for the Secret Service, then moved into battlefield photography^*1. He left Brady in November 1862 and set up his own studio, taking much of Brady's experienced staff with him. In 1865–66 Gardner published Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War, two volumes containing 100 albumen silver prints. Unlike Brady, who suppressed individual photographers' credits, Gardner specifically named all eleven contributors — a principled assertion of authorship in documentary photography^*1. The Getty Museum calls it "the first published collection of Civil War photographs"^*2. After photographing the carnage at Antietam in 1862 — images exhibited in New York to audiences who had never seen the actual face of war — Gardner produced at Gettysburg one of the most debated photographs in the medium's history: "Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter" (1863). Subsequent research has established that the body was moved, the stone-wall position was staged, and the rifle leaning against the rocks was a prop — questions about documentary ethics that still resonate^*2. In 1865 he was the only photographer permitted to document the execution of Lincoln's four conspirators, the Secret Service granting him unrestricted access throughout the investigation^*3. After the war he was appointed chief photographer for the Kansas Pacific Railroad (1867), documenting westward expansion through Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, and published the results in 1869^*2. The Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, in its 2015–16 retrospective "Dark Fields of the Republic," called Gardner "America's first modern photographer," crediting him with injecting a sobering realism into American visual culture^*4. The Metropolitan Museum has written that "it was Gardner who actually executed" the grand idea of an epic Civil War documentation that Brady had conceived^*1.