I think part of the reason why the American Civil War continues to hold such a grip on the popular imagination is because it was the first major historical event to be extensively documented by photography. Even the most realistic painting doesn’t have the immediacy of a photograph, that realization that the person in the image was once a real, living, breathing, sweating, honest-to-god human being rather than somebody the artist made up, coupled with the eerie sense that maybe, if you could somehow figure out how to extend your fingers through the surface of the photographic medium — the paper, or tin, or glass — you could actually touch that person, even if they’ve been dead for decades. Photos from the Civil War are doubly eerie because of the technique that was used to make them, something called collodion, or “wet-plate” photography. For various technical reasons I don’t entirely understand and won’t attempt to work out here, wet-plate photos are simultaneously very detailed and yet they have kind of a ghostly quality, too, as if the subject isn’t entirely of this earth. Every individual whisker stands out on a man’s chin, but if the person has blue eyes, they appear to be inhumanly transparent. You can see swirls of the chemicals used to create the image, since they were literally wet and oozing down the surface of the negative, or “plate,” at the moment the picture was taken, and this lends a curious, otherworldly patina. And then you add in artifacts created by the cameras of the day, the dark circular vignetting around the corners of the image, the shallow depth of focus, or the slight motion blur created by very long exposure times, and it all adds up to something we’ve been conditioned to interpret as the look of old photographs. But it isn’t really chronological age that produces this unique appearance; it’s simply the photographic technique that was used. The pictures looked that way the day they were taken.
For some examples of what I’m talking about, have a look at The Soldier Portraits Project, in which modern-day soldiers are photographed using the 150-year-old wet-plate process. The results are hauntingly beautiful and timeless. The image I’ve posted above is one I particularly like; I think if this man weren’t wearing a wristwatch, it’d be tough to place exactly what era he comes from, and I find that fascinating. It reinforces a truth which I think is lost on a lot of high-school kids as they nap through boring history classes, namely that people who lived 150 years ago were no different from the people you see everyday on the street. Go check out the complete portfolio; it’s really neat stuff…
