Picturing a 19th-century Battle

Picturing a 19th-century Battle. . A French scientist invented photography in 1832. By 1861, the beginning of the Civil War, photography had progressed a great deal. However, photographers still created images mostly on glass (daguerreotype) or tin (tintype). Each image took a long time to expose. The first paper prints (carte de viste) became popular in the mid 1850s, but even those required several minutes of a very still pose. Can you imagine a battle stopping for 3 to 15 minutes for a photograph to be taken? How could everyone and everything hold still for that long?, So how did newspapers get images of battles? Well, they used artists who drew the battle from an observation point, making rough drafts during the battle and then filling in the details later from memory. “Harper's Weekly” and “Frank Leslie's illustrated” newspapers employed several artists who traveled with the Union Army. The South had no artists traveling with their armies., Captions: , Top left: The Waud brothers worked as artists for “Harper's Weekly,” the most widely read newspaper in the North. Alfred drew the sketch above of the Battle of Resaca. William probably drew the sketch to the right of the Battle of Lay's Ferry, which occurred just south of here at the same time as the Resaca. , Bottom left: The artists would complete their sketches after the battle and send them by messenger back to New York City. Next, engravers would create brass plate engravings of the sketches that could be reproduced in newspapers. All of this took from several weeks to a month! The engraving on the left is the published image from Alfred Waud's sketch of the Battle of Resaca shown above. , Right: Traveling photographers like the one shown above often photographed a battlefield after the battle was over and both armies had moved on. Notice how the photographer on the far right is blurry , he moved while the photograph was being exposed. Below is a photograph of Resaca battlefield after the battle.