It was 150 years ago (April 12, 1861) that the deadliest war in U.S. history commenced, casting in its wake over 625,000 military deaths and an incalculably large number of non-fatal casualties. And while the nearly five year conflict between northern federalists and southern confederates was not the first war to leave behind an extensive photographic record—that honor goes to the Crimean War and the efforts of Robert Fenton—its photographic record is nevertheless extensive and impressive, particularly given the state of photographic technology at the time.
There is no shortage of photographs that one could point to as emblematic of the so-called “civil war,” portraits and landscapes alike, and as the sesquicentennial celebration unfolds over the next five years we will not doubt see many of them on display, marking the war in general as well as the specific anniversary of particular battles. And that is as it should be. Nevertheless, one photograph stands out above them all—at least in my estimation—as a powerful and searing allegory of war itself. That photograph, seen above, is Timothy O’Sullivan’s “A Harvest of Death.”
The photograph appeared originally in Alexander Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the American Civil War, published in 1866. The image displays the fields of Gettysburg in the aftermath of the three day battle that left nearly 8,000 dead bodies. Captioned by Gardner, the photograph is accompanied by a legend that identifies the dead bodies as “rebels” who “paid with life the price of their treason.” That characterization has been contested in recent times and is almost surely incorrect, as there is compelling evidence that many of the dead bodies are actually union soldiers. But whether the men who once occupied those bodies fought for one cause or another is really beside the point, for what the photograph shows are the utter and abject effects of war that truly know no ideological boundaries—no right or wrong, no good or evil. Indeed, notice how the image is minimalist in the extreme in this regard. Dead bodies in a field, virtually indistinguishable from one another. It could be anywhere in the world—and, of course, it has been. What more is there to know?
But of course, there is more. In the absence of a pall to cover the bodies it is clear that all suffer alike, and not just those represented in the image, but those who dare to view it as well—both then and now, both up close and at a distance. Shot so that the frontal plane of the photographer/ viewer parallels the frontal plane of the scene itself, the photograph is framed by a frontal angle that not only objectifies the scene by purporting to show all that there is to show, but it also directly involves the viewer in the world being represented. Whether we like it or not, we too are part of this world, pulled in further by the linear perspective of the image that draws our vision from the clear and sharply focused bodies in the foreground to the smaller bodies that seem to extend to the hazy horizon … and beyond.
And there is more still, for the bodies themselves, while lifeless, nevertheless perform for the viewer, miming the grotesqueries of an undignified death. Again in Gardner’s words, they recall “the ancient legends of men torn in pieces by the savage wantonness of fiends.” Note in particular the soldier closest to the front of the image, his face contorted, his mouth open as in a silent scream that relies upon no ethnic or national language and that will never die out.
Alas, and for all the many things that war may be, there is no denying that it is fundamentally a harvest of death. As we sow, so shall we reap.
Photo Credit: Timothy Sullivan/Alexander Gardner