 Good morning everyone. Welcome to today's lecture. My name is Martha Lucy. I'm deputy director for research interpretation and education here at the Barnes, and it is my pleasure to introduce Makita Best. Makita Best is the Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography at the Harvard Art Museums. Before going to Harvard, she was assistant professor in visual studies at California College of the Arts. She holds a PhD from Harvard. She specializes in 19th and 20th century American photography with particular interest in photojournalism, documentary and war photography. She has published and in many scholarly journals and volumes. She has a book coming out with Penn State Press. It'll be out in March of 2020, and it's called Arouse the Conscience, Alexander Gardner, Photography and Democracy in 19th century America. Today's lecture complements the photography exhibition that's upstairs, that focuses on early, you know, the beginnings of photography in France and England, and so we thought that it would be interesting to do something on early American photography. So Makita will be talking about photography's beginnings in the US, looking especially at social reform photography during the Civil War era. So please help me welcome Makita Best. Thank you. Thank you, Martha, and thank you all for joining me this morning. It's wonderful to be here. In the surviving daguerreotype of the Great Chartist Meeting at Kennington Common in South London on April 10th, 1848, a large crowd gathers around an elevated platform. Made from an elevated vantage point, the majority of the figures had their backs to the camera. They appear to stand with attention. The massive public meeting was to end with a dramatic and final attempt at the presentation of a petition of signatures demanding Parliament accept the document known as the Charter. The Charter listed, among other demands, universal manhood suffrage. The morning did not go as planned, however, and those that did come had begun to leave. Throughout the composition, the open pockets in the crowd served to draw focus to different groupings and details. In the foreground, some sit on bleachers. In the bottom right, a man pauses with his carriage and turns to look. In the right middle ground, two young boys stand in an open pocket. Flags can be seen in the crowd at the back of the image. Exposure times for the daguerreotype process, barely ten years old, were still slow. For this reason, the figures appear nearly motionless since the camera was unable to seize movement. Outside of the image, the cavalry and the infantry guarded government buildings and troops waited and nearby steamboats ready to defend the capital should the crowds turn violent. Although the movement's main leader, Fiergris O'Connor, claimed the petitions in support of the reforms contained nearly six million signatures. The clerks at the House of Commons rejected it, claiming it had contained fraudulent signatures and that the actual number was insufficient. This petition, the third in a series of attempts at Chartres' reform, failed like earlier efforts in 1839 and 1842. In the daguerreotype of the event, the air of anticipation and the stillness of those who came to support the reform capture uncannily what many perceived as the end of a movement and the uncertainty its supporters felt. Despite what occurred that day, Alexander Gardner, three years later, told his countrymen that the cause of workers' rights that had led marchers to Kennington Common endured. Quote, civilization has as yet half but half performed its mission. He and his team of co-editors wrote to the readers of the radical paper, The Glasgow Sentinel, on October 4th, 1851, its first anniversary of publication. In fact, when the Sentinel was found in 1850, its founders proclaimed boldly that the Sentinel's mission was that of the Chartres of Connor and they endorsed broader policies inspired by the social theorist Robert Owen. They believed their social and political reform to be the most effective response to a range of conditions in society that they linked to industrialization. Our policy, Gardner's editors wrote, is briefly summed up. The enfranchisement of labor, the elevation of the masses, the rendering of civilization, a great fact and not a heartless fiction, to bring home to the earth the hearth of the poor man as well as the parlor of the rich the blessings of plenty and the soul enabling influence of knowledge. In the volatile society of mid-19th century Scotland, new formats and platforms of criticism and dissent empowered everyday citizens to enter the public arena. Alexander Gardner was one of them. After co-founding a utopian community in Iowa in 1849, in 1851 Gardner purchased the Glasgow Sentinel, quote, a liberal newspaper having a large and increasing circulation at auction. Yet by the Civil War Gardner was living in Washington D.C., working as a studio owner and photographer and enjoying reputation as one of the war's most significant photographic artists. Contemporary critics enjoyed how such aspects as the textures in his image of Burnside's bridge and teetom and claimed it was one of and they claimed it was one of the most beautiful photographs he'd ever seen. While author and jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes synthesized the sense of both horror and profound sadness that audiences felt when they encountered Gardner's unprecedented images of dead soldiers. Gazing at the bodies that were stiff with rigor mortis and distorted from rot, he called them, quote, wrecks of manhood thrown together in careless heaps or ranged in ghastly rows for burial who were alive but yesterday. But what to make of Gardner's radical claims and deep commitments to transatlantic reform communities during his Scotland years? Gardner's most well-known project of the era was his epic photographic book, Gardner's Photographic Sketchbook of the War, published in 1865 by the Washington-based firm Philip and Solomon's. Franklin Philip and Augustus Simeon Solomon's and Gardner had been collaborators since Gardner opened his studio. Each of the roughly 12 by 18 inch leather-bound volumes included 50 sequenced, tipped-in photographs culled from the studio's collection of images made during the war and each was presented in the book with extended captions written by Gardner who also wrote the preface. In addition, Gardner printed the works. Gardner members of his photographic corps made the photographs and they mostly document the activities of the Army of the Potomac in the Virginia area. It is in this project that brings into focus how Gardner drew on transatlantic reform dialogues and how these ideas form the basis of his interpretation of the meaning of the American conflict. Two ideas, two of the ideas central in the book, slavery and the status of the laborer, were the main causes of his reform community as well. The first volume opens with an image made by William Pylewell of a structure that would have been familiar to readers. From an elevated vantage point, the photograph depicts a tavern six miles south of the White House in Alexandria, Virginia called Marshall House, the location marking the first shot of the Civil War. On May 24, 1861, Virginia seceded from the Union and process session Marshall House owner James Jackson quickly hoisted a Confederate flag atop the structure. Union Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, former colleague of President Lincoln, angrily went to retrieve the flag. Ellsworth was killed by Jackson and Jackson was subsequently shot by one of Ellsworth's men. Remember Ellsworth became the rallying cry of Union troops as they prepared for war. The rebel tavern was located at the corner of King and Pitt Streets. Pylewell made the photograph the site at an angle and we can see its corner location. Down Pitt Street, Tin Block South, was a street called Duke Street. Turning right on Duke Street was another infamous structure that Pylewell also photographed and this photograph is the second in Gardner's visual history of the war. Known by then simply as the Slave Pin, the site at 1717 Duke Street was the former headquarters of the Tennessee-based slave trading firm of Isaac Franklin and John Armfield. At its peak from 1830 to 1836, Franklin Armfield led all of the firms in Maryland, Virginia, the district and perhaps the entire south in slave trading. Duke Street was also Little River Turnpike which conveniently offered the firm access to inland plantations and farms where slaves came from. From Duke Street slaves began their walk in overland coffals or they were taken to the riverfront and from there they would travel south by ship. A letter to the Alexandria Gazette described a weekly ritual, quote, After having been confined and sometimes manacled in a loathsome prison, they are turned out in public view to take their departure to the south. The children and some of the women are generally crowded into a wagon or cart while others follow one foot, frequently handcuffed and chained together. Between the 1840s and the Civil War, the business changed hands a few times and eventually came to be known by a firm calling itself Price Birch and Company. During the pre-Civil War era, the site was just one of a number of slave pins or nigger jails as they were called around the District of Columbia, some even within blocks of the Capitol building that served at the thriving slave trade in the Chesapeake. The site of slave coffals along the streets shocked visitors and foreign dignitaries. Slave pins functioned as holding spaces. Slave traders kept slaves in the pins as they awaited auction in the district or for their transport to the south where they were sent to work in the sugarcane fields. Drawing on the hypocrisy of slave trading in the nation's capital, American and British abolitionists targeted the site for their cause through the 1850s. The bottom right illustration on the American anti-slavery society broadside portrayed a scene at the Franklin Armfield firm and is perhaps the first image of it. A long coughle of slaves marches out of the building under the direction of a well-dressed man in a top hat. The man points with one hand and grasps a slightly raised whip in the other. Days walk barefoot in a line with men in front and women in the rear. Some in the coughle hold their sides as if they suffer from injuries or embracing themselves for a blow. The figures in the foreground are nearly dwarfed by the warn of irregular white buildings and white fences that make up the complex. Smoke stacks and empty windows on the front and the back of the building animate the plain structures and imply suffering and the human presence inside. During the Civil War, the pin was one of the first sites to be captured by the Union Army and Northerners celebrated their side's occupation of this historic and symbolic location. Figures in Andrew Joseph Russell's photograph forcefully claim the new ownership. A Union guard stands outside at attention. Boarded in broken windows suggest the confrontation was a dramatic process. There is no slave dealing here anymore. Gardner's prominent inclusion of the subject of slavery in his photographic war narrative is provocative. Walking the blocks, turning the page, Marshall House is the front to slave pens back. The slave pen recalls the role of slavery in the war, a topic few visual histories in 1866 sought to engage. Why did Gardner include this image and how did it serve as interpretation of the meaning of this war? How did his presentation of the image and the issue of slavery draw on British reform ideas and visual strategies? Rather than mere biographical detail, we need to take seriously Gardner's reform interest and his affiliations with the followers of Robert Owen, the secular communitarian, and Chartism, the radical working class British movement. Related to his support to these movements was his support for abolition, pacifism, temperance, and vegetarianism. Owenites and Chartists were adept at using print and literary forms and visual rhetoric as means to define their movement to encourage and to attract followers. During the 1850s, Scottish leaders from both of these groups came together to agitate for reform. Gardner wrote forward and was the owner of the main platform for this new movement, The Newspaper of the Glasgow Sentinel, which was founded by men determined to carry on the work of a movement many thought to be floundering if not dead. This context suggests a new way of understanding sketchbook's presentation of the Civil War as a history. The book's conception and its political messages suggest the ways in which the transatlantic dialogues around photography extended beyond the sharing of technical expertise. Gardner's experience in Scotland and his association with reform movements informed his work to use images as political tools. The photographically illustrated book form as a format and Gardner's approach to it support a political motivation to contribute to and add new dimension to a transatlantic body of reform writing and to portray the United States in the wake of the eradication of slavery as a true democracy. And thus the realization of an ideal that reformers worldwide had envisioned for decades. Now Gardner's sketchbook, because of its subject matter, length in cooperation of both photographs and text and its price, was conceptually and technically an enormous contribution to the American photographic community. The production of photographically illustrated book was an expensive, complex and time consuming process. Each book had to be assembled by hand. They were fragile, heavy and often unwieldy. The European photographic community had been experimenting with and discussing photographic book illustration since the 1840s. Though the format and content of his photographic illustrated book, The Pencil of Nature, British inventor William Henry Fox Talbot made a clear argument that the future for photography lay in its potential for insertion and application in a variety of print settings. While the daguerreotype focused mainly on human beings' subjects, Talbot's photographic model taught practitioners to find meanings beyond people. Demonstrating the plethora of uses for carts, ladders, haystacks, books and other objects, Talbot's work suggested a photographic language that was distinct from the daguerreotype in which displaced people as the primary carriers of meaning. By contrast, Americans lagged behind in photographic book production because paper-based photography emerged later in America. Thinkers of the antebellum era imagined the daguerreotype's material and pictorial role in recovering proof of and promoting the validity of the nation's providential origins and divine mission. Poet Walt Whitman added to the mood with such poems as Poem of Pictures from 1850 in which he described seeing a daguerreotype, quote, and that it is a wondrous mirror long at Lake Clouded, but the cloud has passed away. It is now a clean and bright mirror. It will show you all you can conceive of, all you wish to behold. And yet the portrait daguerreotypes focused on highly controlled settings, studio operating rooms, elite subjects, and the preciousness of the photographic object was unsuited to a media environment that demanded the translation and dissemination of an image across formats. While the American public embraced the daguerreotype, leading practitioners looked to Europe and bemoaned America's lack of innovation in paper-based photography, quote, the philosophers of Europe are daily toiling in search of still hidden principles of the art and every year brings forth from their laboratories some new application, noted one critic. Sketchbook in which Gardner demonstrated the possibilities of photographic narratives represented a dramatic advancement in paper-based photography in America. Reviewers responded especially to the book's subject matter and distinguished its presentation of realistic detail from that of the war's more dominant medium, illustrated journalism. The Daily National Intelligentser hailed Sketchbook as a magnificent work and praised, quote, that graphic truthfulness which can be attained only by the photographer's art. Reviewers appreciated the plainness of the photograph, quote, the eye rests upon these pictured pages with the happy consciousness that they are no fancy sketches drawn out of the artist's head for the sensational adornment of some pictorial newspaper. London's The Art Journal similarly suggested the project made palpable the difference between photographic representations and drawing and painting. The focus on the realism of the photographs recalls the reaction to British photographer Roger Fenton's Crimean War photographs ten years prior. In response to his landscapes, a reviewer wrote, quote, one seconds over some of the frightful details represented by a pencil that cannot air. There are none of the refinements of painting here. There is nothing of the beautiful but the beautiful of reality. Reviewers respond, it associated the realist mode with moral persuasion. More than a decade after analyzing Fenton's photograph, The Art Journal speculated Sketchbook would, quote, teach a lesson. We trust that will have influence for all time in the country and to the people who during four terrible years endured miseries and witnessed horrors that even those that made even those shutter who lived in peace thousands of miles away. Gardner's art frequently bears the imprint of his knowledge about American culture and history and the convictions that inspire him to pursue such knowledge and his Sketchbook is no exception. In his political writing for the Glasgow Sentinel during 1851-1852, he was clear about his intention to use media to influence public opinion. He wrote to his readers that he, quote, purchased the paper not as a mere speculation, but as a means of enlightening the public on the great political, educational and social aspects of our times and of guiding a right, the popular mind of this country on all matters of state policy. While in the early 1850s he was writing about using the newspaper platform as a means of persuasion on moral issues, later he would use photographs to perform that same function. Most importantly, Gardner stated that his mission was to, quote, was to support what he called the establishment of democracy, quote, the principle that the people is the source of all political power. In true democracy and false, he defined that democracy as existing when all men of sane mind and self-supporting means are equally respect worthy in a political sense, and that as having an equal interest in the well-working of the state, it behooves each to equally do his part by thought and action toward that well-working. Over a decade before his immigration to the United States in 1854, America, its history, its leaders, and its government existed vividly in Gardner's transatlantic reform community as potent social and political symbols of the democratic ideal and of human progress. Through its texts and images, Sketchbook voiced a similarly pointed commentary that insisted on an international conception of the United States and the history of the world, and it emphasized that democracy would naturally triumph as a political system over ancient evils like slavery and aristocracies. Throughout the 1840s, radicals had foretold of the coming of democracy. The Glasgow Shardist Debating Society predicted that democracy, though slow in its progress, is sure and must ultimately triumph because it is in accordance with natural right and because it is better adopted than any other system to the present months and necessities of society. To Scots like Gardner, the American democratic model confirmed egalitarian ideals about the potential of social and political institutions. Gardner's inclusion of the capital building in his studio, Emblem, was meant to announce more than just its location. Gardner's photographic core, also immigrants from Great Britain who participated in the same political, cultural, and social activities around the district as he did, apparently shared his views. Within the transnational reform community of which Gardner was a part, these ideas were discussed and debated by a number of prominent intellectuals and everyday activists in the texts they wrote and shared, and by the pictures and journals and societies they founded. This worldwide politically motivated print project relied on various print means to disseminate messages and permeate culture. Gardner and his colleagues championed collective investigation of words and images in print as particularly enlightening methods of analyzing the world. Among reformers there was a belief that social problems had to be represented before they could be solved, and it was this representational project that united reformers in goals, techniques, and forms. In the mid-19th century, the startling conditions for the poor, often existing alongside great affluence, became the focus of a new kind of illustrated journalism which emerged in mainstream and specialized publications in Britain, social reportage. Social reportage emerges in periodicals like the British Poor Man's Guardian. The Poor Man's Guardian published by the Poor Man's Guardian Society frequently turned to architecture in their critique. In images depicting living conditions, the crumbling architectural frame functions as a metaphor for the decline of core civic values, which to reformers a result of industrialization and capitalism. Cutaway views dramatically reveal the conditions inside. Oweness and Chardis sought to use mass media to appeal to audiences intellectually and emotionally. Owen said, quote, if we cannot yet reconcile all opinions, let us endeavor to unite all hearts. Similarly, Gardner was described as wanting to, quote, convince the understanding, arouse the conscience, and affect the heart. In photography, Gardner found a unique pictorial language through which to argue opinions, to convince the understanding, and to impact the heart through factual detail and realism. As he asserts in the preface of Sketchbook, photography and photographic detail had the rhetorical power to exceed that of the written word. While Talbot argued the photographic detail would have practical significance, Gardner seizes on the function of the tale in the historical memory. He writes, verbal representations of such places or scenes may or may not have the merit of accuracy, but photographic presentments of them will be accepted by posterity with an undoubting faith. The critique in Gardner's presentation of slavepin is also constructed around architecture and the built environment. Pibles' compositional choices in slavepin urged the viewer to analyze the functions of these structures while imagining the horrors that took place inside of it. On the right of the main structure is a high white fence, the holding yards. To the left of the structure is a one-story structure. To the left of the main office structure in the center is a one-story structure. The trees in the darker outline portions of the photograph accentuate the darker portions of the interior of the photograph, such as the bars on the one-story structure's three cavernous windows. Now these bars were not original to the structure, but were added when the Union Army seized the sites and began using it as a prison. The pile image apparently disregards the Union Army's repurposing of the structure, thus leading the viewer to believe the bars were linked to the slave trading. This association forces the viewer to move beyond the evidence offered by the signage, dealers and slaves, and to focus on the concrete presence of the building where Pibles suggests slaves were kept. Pibles situates the viewer within the geography of slave trading, and his photograph, by drawing attention to the bars, articulates the conditions and costs of slavery. One imagines how dark it must have been inside of this large building and the number of people who could have been contained there. In the visual dissimilarity between the neat three-story office building and what looks like a squat warehouse structure with its barred windows, Pibles' photograph represents a frank image of the racialization of the built environment and chattel slavery's devaluing of human life. A correspondent for the Cleveland Herald suggested as much, describing an area where, quote, hundreds of human beings of both sexes were huddled together like cattle. Other photographs, like that one made by Russell, focused on the signage, Pibles' image and Gardner's text enforce the idea that slavery is the ultimate horror, people who profit from an economic system that depends on enslavement. Gardner's caption reads, In many of the southern cities, the people had erected buildings of this kind for the confinement of slaves awaiting sale. The establishment represented in the photograph was situated in the western suburbs of Alexandria, near the depot of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad. The main brick building was used by the clerks of the firm and the overseers. The high brick wall encores a courtyard in which were stable sand outhouses for the accommodation of planters who came in for the purpose of selling and purchasing slaves. The large building on the right was used for the confinement of Negroes. It had a number of apartments in which slaves could be kept singling or in gangs and one large mess room where they received their food. The establishment was essentially a prison. The doors were very strong and were secured by large locks and bolts. Iron bars were fixed to the masonry of the windows and manacles were frequently placed on limbs of those suspected of designs for escape. Auction sales regularly held, at which Virginia farmers disposed of their servants to cotton and sugar planters from the Gulf states. If a slave owner needed money which he could not easily procure, he sold one of his slaves and the threat of being sent south constantly held over the servants as security for faithful labor and good behavior. Before the war, a child three years old would sell in Alexandria for about $50. An able-bodied man at from $1,000 to $1,800. A woman would bring $500 to $1,500 according to her age and her personal attractions. By stressing the presence of these pins within the community, architectural images questioned the values of that community. The slave pin violated core social beliefs about the function of architecture. The Roman architect and author Vitruvius described the first building of a house to fill a need. Proto-humans built homes because of the growing understanding of their vulnerability to natural elements and their fear of threatening animals. The shelter would provide basic human comfort. The slave pin structure thwarts that purpose and violates the moral codes implicit in the common need for shelter. The loathsome prison did not enhance the community environment. Although the slave pin site masqueraded as a regular architecture, those kept inside of it endured unknown terrors. Eventually, those terrors were turned out, as in the words of the exerber who wrote into the Alexandria Gazette, into the public view. To Scottish intellectuals, slavery was among the most alarming of social abuses. The extreme of the polarization between employer and employee. This abstracted conceptualization separated the idea of the slave and slavery from any notion, however, of the humanity of enslaved people. Instead, the focus was on the slave trade's use of technologies and its use of technology to perpetuate suffering over the progress of mankind, which was perhaps the ultimate result of a gardener and others feared about industrialization and modernity. Another famous work by a British artist associated with abolition similarly found residence through, among other details, its economic associations. Turner's slave ship, Albert Boehm writes, folds into its visual and thematic structure the economic issues peculiar to England's industrial development by 1840. Boehm suggests details such as the dismembered lake in the water stemmed from the fact that the work recalled the realities of the modern industrial factory. The industrial worker in Chartres literature was often cast as a slave, and in many Chartres poems, slavery was generalized. In other words, Chartres poems deployed slavery as a generalized and generalizing metaphor for oppression. What Gardner proposes in slave pen however goes further. For him, echoing the ideas of his reformed community, society as a whole suffers from the oppression of capitalism and not just the worker. At the same time as Gardner and his cohort bemoaned the failure of Kennington Common, they held America up as a model for what their country and civilization should be. But chattel slavery forced Gardner and other radicals to qualify their support for the American model in antebellum years. By representing a fundamental dissonance with the concept of true democracy, Scott's like Gardner argued slavery threatened the American economy and political systems and thus its function as a worldwide model. This reasoning was expressed in the one title of an article in the Sentinel The American Union Danger. The Sentinel attacked the Fugitive Slave Act in multiple pieces, including one that argued that it was a blot on the American legislation. Through the retelling of a story of James Hamlet, the first fugitive slave to be returned from a free state to the south under provisions of the Act. The Sentinel described the act as the crowning act of sin and folly. The institution of slavery as more vile and repugnant to every just and honorable feeling that has ever been known in the history of society. And the compromise of 1850 was a monstrous perversion of language. Other articles spoke of the need for a war on slavery, or as they called it, a corruption inherited from preceding ages. Now in sketchbook, the nation is finally rid of slavery and Gardner's focus on the agricultural industrial possibilities reflects the faith that the new nation will thrive on true labor rather than slave labor. He turns from denigrating slavery as a form of labor to extolling the Union Army as a laboring force. Gardner and his firm's attention to the labor of the Union Army and his portraits of soldiers can be read as occupational portraits of sorts. The common soldiers that Gardner and his studio corps members photographed were known as the Army roughs, a broad term that was used to refer to lower class soldiers. Regiments, sometimes composed of hundreds of men, included masons, house rights, teamsters, boiler makers, mechanics, lumberjacks, and carpenters. The majority of the labor entailed the construction of housing, hospitals, and battlefield structures. Metaphorically, these men did not just fight for the Union, but for democracy itself. Gardner foresees the end of slavery as a triumph for labor and thus for democracy. In Gardner's democratic ideal, the post-war world is one of agricultural bliss. The texts and references in sketchbook stress the land at the principal feature. Grounds or fertile and areas such as those around that of Fairfax Courthouse are diversified, with hill, wood, and valley, fine farms, pretty brooks with stone bridges, and above all the noble chain of the Blue Ridge. Sketchbook's catalog of natural resources establishes geography as a central aspect of the book. The boundary of resources associated with the diversity of land-based economies and the ingenuity of people who take advantage of it. Despite what appears to be a flat landscape and the line of Confederate troops depicted in plate 34, Gardner tells readers the area around Aldi, Virginia is very diversified. Virginia is in general describes the state full of waterways, fertile, and forested regions. Inland, he writes of native plant species and the fine oysters available in Yorktown. He describes the landscape in nuanced detail from calling the Chickaminney Bridge, quote, home of almost every variety of Virginia reptiles, to describing the wild roses and honeysuckle that grow alongside groves of peach trees. Gardner portrays the abundance of the land, and these are not random details or contexts, but facts that matter to those invested in the rebuilding and economic opportunities. Throughout the texts, rivers, mountains, ranges, and a railroad geographically unite the disparate selection of locales depicted in the photographs and encourage a sense of balanced resources. The agrarian themes that recur throughout the text and sketchbook represent a new nation of moral as well as fiscal tranquility and prosperity. The caption of one photograph positions the husbandman as the next principal actor within this landscape. On the ill-fated fields of Antietam, Gardner writes of his own photograph that, quote, houses and fences have been repaired, harvests have been ripened over the breast of the fallen, and the plow share only now and then turns up a shot as a relic of that great struggle. The Confederate fortifications at Manassas, we are told in plate 11, are in the process of being dismantled, and the farmer's plow is gently turning the furrow. The standing figures communicate the occupation of the Union army. The immediate subject of the photograph is the foreground and the wooden platforms laid there. As the caption explains, the platforms are usually used as mounts for Confederate guns, though now those platforms stand empty. A toppled table in the ditch adds movement to the image by suggesting a sudden action. George Bernard and James Gibson maintain the viewer's attention in the rest of the photograph through the vantage point, which depicts snaking fortifications reaching into the background of the image. The movement into space and toward the horizon creates a parallel movement to the violence symbolized by traditional use of the platforms in the foreground. British photographer Roger Fenton stunned viewers with photographs of desolation that simultaneously suggested the horrors of both war's actions and its aftermath. By contrast, Gardner's text actively replaced the image of aftermath offered by the photograph with other mental images. In another sketchbook photograph, the Frederick Bergs Valley is presented as, quote, the scene of one of the most thrilling events of the war, but yet its fertility is unsurpassed. Nature, morality and industry persist. A row of trees, damage but still standing along the riverfront, frame the river that flows through the middle of the image and the mill situated along the bank. Gardner describes fierce fighting over a number of days, but at present, quote, business is resumed with an activity that betokens a brilliant future. The details in the photographs convey the message in the text. The bridge in the middle of the photograph is destroyed, but the mill stands untouched. The lighting conditions enhance the appearance of the textures of the wood and the size of the structure draws the viewer's attention to it as a central element. Meanwhile, several church spires form a skyline. These photographs work together to emphasize the beauty of agrarian society, which Gardner believed would be instrumental to restoring the nation's well-being, both in terms of the morality of its citizens and the stability of its economy after the travesties of war. Praise for agriculture and the values of country life had been an important theme in European thought since the Renaissance. As a follower of Robert Owen, Gardner believed that to live the agrarian life was to live in harmony with the world. The industrial life, by contrast, lacked unity and stability and only fostered fragmentation, loneliness and strife. Gardner depicts the land as the basis for change in society. Owenites believed that the land contained sufficient wealth to sustain people and that the creation of farms was central to the creating a new moral world. Gardner's transatlantic reform community frequently invoked a vision of pre-industrial bliss governed by natural laws in which nature was the great teacher. After the war, Gardner, Owenites and Gardner pointed out models of agriculture-based communities that thrived through hard work machinery developed by northern farmers rather than slaves, capable management, and a small amount of capital. Though industrialization compounded by slavery in the war deteriorated society's moral morality and cohesiveness, sketchbook in particular shows how moral rectitude and oneness with the earth could be achieved again through agriculture. These soldiers then fight for more than just a union, but the restoration of the American democratic model. Here is where civilization would fulfill its mission by rejecting industrial capitalism and its values would produce slavery and almost destroyed the country. During this period, the popularity of landscape and landscape images reflected a belief that the physical environment formed the character of its inhabitants. Since the 1820s, American art had successfully translated ideas about the powerful link between nature and human character into a nationalist landscape aesthetic that instructed Americans in moral and civic behavior. This moral picturesque mode functioned as a bulwark against moral and spiritual anarchy. Scholars from Angela Miller to Eleanor Jones Harvey argued that for American painters, meteorological phenomena were a key symbolic vehicle for communicating the crisis at mid-century. For Gardner, these symbols had their roots in a political tradition as metaphors for the power of everyday people to affect historical change. In radical working class poetry, symbolism drew heavily from nature in order to stress the naturalness of revolutionary process. For example, in Chartres-Ernest Jones' popular poem, When the World Was Burning of 1845, Eir fears flames uprushing, Overlands leaping, crushing, Till Earth's fall, fire swaths, Up amiss meadows, gently through shadows, Gentle flames will glide, Small, Blue, and Golden. All the landscape photographs are visible reminders of the horrors of war. It is Sketchbook's captions that mediate the viewer's response by contextualizing events within a natural process of revolutionary change. Sketchbook is Gardner's vision of the post-world world as an opportunity for a farm-based economy, the kind of economy he himself worked to establish in 1849 when he founded a farm-based cooperative in a colony in Iowa. He borrows the conceptual strategies and themes from his reformed community and translates these into a compelling and innovative photographic narrative. In the Sketchbook form, in the photographic book form, Gardner charted the fall of slavery, promoted an economic future based in agriculture, and engaged viewers, readers with his post-war, post-slavery vision of the true promise of American democracy. In the process, he made a contribution to the history of photography and to the transatlantic Anglo-American public sphere of reform, as well as established a model for photography as a tool for more uplift and persuasion, a model that continues to impact photography today. Thank you. There is the infamous box. Yes. Are you able to take a few questions? Great. Okay, so this is our microphone. When you ask your question, please speak into the microphone so that everybody can hear, and this is also being recorded. So questions or comments? Yes. Okay. I'm actually going to kind of toss it to you. Oh, wow. This is... That's the idea. Get ready. Thank you. The photographs of the Civil War, could you comment about how widely they were circulated at the time that they were taken? Yeah. So we're looking at photographs that existed within this book, and as you may know, this book was probably out of reach for the everyday citizen. It was by contemporary standards, it would have been about $7,000. So the average American was not purchasing this book. What they were purchasing were... He also sold these as individual images, and many of them also exist as stereographs, which are a double lens image. So they would have purchased those smaller images, stereographs, cart de visite versions, maybe a larger print, but they would have not have owned this book. It was wildly unsuccessful. He imagined probably that it would be purchased by libraries and in various repositories, but it didn't really sell very well. And part of it is also that it was time consuming to create, as I alluded to. Each of these is one photograph that has to be printed, first of all, made, glued onto the paper. The paper has to be printed separately from the image. It has to be created, put together by hand. These books are about this large and this wide, and they literally, you know, the pages are leather bound. They're very fragile. So yes, the average American would not have seen these images. They would have purchased them another way, but they also would have seen them in publications like Harper's Weekly, which translated them into wood engravings. So photography at this time is not as popular as it is today. As we look at these photographs and we think, wow, you know, the Civil War wasn't everybody seeing these images. They actually weren't. And so one of the core arguments that Garner's making in Sketchbook is actually he's trying to explain how photography could work as these types of images. As I was moving between the beginning, Americans were not used to paper-based photography. They were really interested in portraiture. So what he's doing in this book is also educating Americans about how to look at an image like this. By pointing these things out, he's showing us how photographs can function as narratives. Because Americans were so interested in portraiture and they didn't really have this kind of landscape interest. So he's really producing kind of a first pictorial narrative that was very innovative at the time, but was not hardly as popular as other types of photography that he made, like his images of Lincoln, the kind of portraits that he made, or illustrated journalism. So it is a very competitive market. And even when I say that Americans would have purchased these as other formats, even that was quite limited. It's not as if they're selling out, you know, thousands of photographs. That was also quite limited. What you're seeing in these is that you really had to be very timely. You had to be here to have kind of images that would capture people such as, you know, this one was very popular. That one was very popular because it was antedom. It was, you know, people could imagine the soldiers going over the bridge, the loss of life. But like this one, people were looking at him. You know, without him telling you what it is, there's no kind of resonances. But the images of the dead were the ones that were really the most popular. And they have remained most popular and part of my work has been to kind of rescue these other images and explain why they're significant and where he got this pictorial model for understanding them, which he borrowed it from his reformed community. He was really using those same kinds of ideas about images as persuasion, about talking about a new world, about human progress and reform. That's still a flawed vision in some ways, but he's using that in order to kind of explain this landscape. The ball's going to run to you. So you touched a little bit on photographs to accurately represent reality, but didn't always do so. I thought the most interesting example in your talk was Valley of Death, Crimean War. And you actually read a quote that the camera is a pencil that doesn't lie. Right. But that photograph I think is now believed lied, right? Yes. Tell us about that. Let's see if I can get back quickly. I think that it's important to understand that in the 19th century the conception of realism was far different than our own. There it is. People, what they're talking about, when they're saying that it doesn't lie, those, the image of the actual balls themselves, the ground, the space, that part is not a lie. But they didn't really mind that it was constructed. They didn't mind the constructed aspect. It was staged, right? Yes. He moved the cannonballs there. The cannonballs were actually moved down into place. But what they enjoyed was that they were looking at an actual representation of the site. And that's what they're thinking about detail. It's a kind of broader conception of detail. It's not what you and I think of, which is like, was that true or not? They enjoyed the photograph as an actual image made at the place. But they only enjoyed it to a point because this image was successful because it was linked to a poem. But it was linked to the march of the, the march of the Tennyson poem. It was very evocative in that way. But they didn't enjoy images like this, which are not quite beautiful, right? They don't really have those kind of associations. They would enjoy things like this kind of hole in the wall, seeing those kinds of details and kind of thinking about them. But their ideas about realism were very different from ours. It was a kind of an expansive detail, a detail that was part fact and part fiction. And something that you kind of meditate on and imagine other things along with it. Was it known that the cannonballs were fiction then or moved there? At the time the photograph was popular? No, but it would be expected that manipulations could have occurred. And they would have looked at this and said, no, it wasn't real. There's no sky there. They knew that these things were in some ways different. They knew that it was not an exact image of reality. They knew that Gardner's sharpshooter, probably seen as the image of the man lying in the ditch, perfectly posed. They didn't mind that that wasn't real. They knew that that was staged in some way. But photographs were used to kind of meditate on reality. They weren't necessarily names. They'd have to represent reality in a way. Or a migrant mother was probably somewhat staged, I think. My mother was very staged. She looked it up there about seven different images. And you see Dorothea Lane focusing in on that. And that little baby that she's got tucked under her arm looks like a baby, like a six-year-old. Like there's no reason. You know, there's a big child. You know, and then she cuts out. You know, there's an older kid. There's an older person there. And she knew. She cut that out because she thought, you know, somebody sees that kid. They're going to say, why does that kid help you? You don't need me. You got her. Put her to work. Right? So people, you know, there are all kinds of manipulations that happen. And this was a little common. And it was common men, but it was accepted. I mean, it was about creating pictures, creating stories. So it was a different kind of outlook on creating images. Of course, they were manipulating. That's what you did to make art. A new twist on fake news. There was a version of a kind of a fakeness. But I think it was a fakeness to get you to think more. Yeah, I think in the fact. Sorry, throwing. Were the French and the British more economically successful during the same period in publishing photography books? And if so, was it the difference in cost structure or perhaps subject matter? That's a good question. What's really interesting about this moment is there's real differences, kind of cultural differences, that America was a young country. They didn't have, you know, long, they didn't have centuries behind them of artistic production, of institutions, of government. They didn't have all that. And so in the daguerreotype, they saw what they did have, which was themselves, which was a new face of a new kind of world. And that's what they pictured. That's what they were excited about picturing. So they embraced portraiture. They produced more portraits. They perfected the daguerreotype. No other country did this in the world like Americans did this. The reason why these kind of South Worth and Hawes images are so incredible. Like if you see these installed, you can walk across a room and you will see it and you will think it's a person looking at you. And that's how incredible they are because they developed methods of polishing the plates. They really pioneered and perfected this imagery. But now in Europe, it was an older country. They had traditions of drawing. They had traditions of science. They were much older. And they were also more global in their interests and aspirations. So the work that they were doing really drew on those interests. I mean, Talbot's talking about ensuring your China. Americans like China. Everybody had Pewter. I mean, you're not ensuring China. They had other, they had interest in science that we were interested in. They had other institutions. And they also had wide networks for disseminating images. Usually as single images in a frontispiece. So you would get a scientific journal and you would have a paper-based photograph in it. So they were using all these networks. They were trading things. They were exploring paper-based photography in ways that Americans just weren't. So did they make money off of it? That really was an interest. It really was about advancement. It really was valuing this as a new science, as a new medium, and advancing that and sharing that knowledge. So they weren't really in it to make money. But they did widely distribute these images through these various networks in these various ways. These weren't profitable because, as you can see now, they were actually kind of unstable. They were subject to fading. They were very fragile. They were time consuming to make. So they weren't necessarily the most practical image. You would still buy one and then you would still have money on your book and it might look like this. It's like, that's not, I don't want that. So it was very hard for them to make money off of them. But there was wide dissemination in terms of sharing them as specimens, as look what I'm doing. And everybody was making them. You could make this. I mean, Talbot made this in his kitchen. You need a knowledge of chemistry, which a lot of people had. A knowledge of chemistry, a knowledge of optics, and the kind of gentleman, the educated gentleman would be making these. You'd make images of your friends. You'd make images around your house. You'd be experimenting with this. All you need was writing paper and basically salt and other kind of chemicals. In the center. Okay. Do you think any photographic... Well, even today, but everything is about a decision. And everything is a manipulation. I mean, everything, it's manipulated in some way. It kind of has to be in order for this to come out like that. There had to be manipulations that occurred in that space of making. And then the decision to make it. And I think that a lot of this is... You do this unconsciously. Then at that time, you didn't want to see people's hands because hands were kind of unsightly and veiny and they moved. And so you didn't have people's hands. So you do... Things were done in ways that were... That's not true. To always see somebody... This is odd to us. People didn't smile. That was odd to us. There are all kinds of manipulation, kind of cultural preferences and informed image making and informed choices. So those kind of produce a kind of a fakeness, if you will, or kind of a... Something that's not real. So I think that to some degree, every image is some sort of manipulation. It just has to be in order to be translated into an image. There's always going to be something. So I think that what's interesting with someone like Gardner is that these artists is how they are actually using these kinds of aspects in order to say something, these little details. They're trying to work out stories with these little mistakes, like the fact that those bars weren't actually in the window. He's going to use those to tell a story and to tell a story in a different way than other people. So I think that it's more interesting to think about what these decisions mean, how they do reflect cultural ideas or broader ideas about nationalism or civilization. They do reflect broader issues in society. I actually want to follow that up with one more question. Sorry. So you were saying that viewers at the time were aware that these were manipulations. They sound like very savvy viewers. Well, to some degree, they would have expected that every... They would have expected just as the way I'm explaining it that you made something, of course, it was some way altered. But was there a point in the history of photography when audiences started to actually believe photography as truth? Yeah. So there's always a wave. So then all of a sudden it's going to become... Then you get straight photography. Then you get people saying, no, it's going to have to be exactly evidence. The reason why these images, why people are pursuing also this more artful image and not direct evidence, right? Someone like Anna Atkins was not valued at the time because this was just evidence. This was fact. That's it. That's fact. That's literally the thing. That wasn't valued because it was seen as too mechanical. It was seen as the camera's vision. And there wasn't really any respect for the camera as a vision. It was like, why do you want a machine to see for you? This does not work. That's not art. And so people made other types of images in order to show that they were still creating the work. So eventually there's going to be respect for that type of imagery. And there's going to be a whole group of people who are going to say, the camera doesn't lie. Let's use a camera vision. And that's a constant tension in photography. The camera vision versus the artistic vision, the so-called artistic vision and how that's negotiated, it goes back and forth throughout the history. And it's there even in the beginning. I mean, probably the reason why these images are not as popular is because they are specimens. And he calls them specimens, right? And there are specimens. Why is Fenton popular versus Atkins, right? And it's because Fenton is an artist. Fenton is interpreting something for us. And she was just recording. And most artists didn't want to record, right? So there's a toggling back and forth between what is valued and what is not. Because eventually this is going to be desired because it's going to say, no, show us the world. Show us that as it is. And that too as cultural associations, those kind of values, when realism is valued versus kind of fantasy. I mean, we had a period of photography in the early 2000s when everyone was creating something, right? And why was everybody, well, basically the 90s through 2000s, why was everybody creating something because people didn't want to believe in history anymore. There was this idea that history was lying to us all so why don't we just make our own? So everybody in photography is constructing things in their studios. So that's what everybody was doing. And then now it's back to basically ever since September 11th people are like, no, we want to see the world. We're not constructing things anymore. There's kind of these cultural moments where there are these shifts in what's valued and has very much to do with world events, with what's happening culturally in the country. But you go from these construction and fake and play and performance back to the real. Thank you so much.