Scourge of War Boards

[/quote]That Antietam photo is also often mistaken for a combat photo but it was actually taken after the battle.[/quote]

Hi, Little Powell, what is your source that the Antietam photo was taken after the battle? The Library of Congress website says this photo was taken "on the day of the battle." I've been looking for more interpretive info on this photo. thx

http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c ... em_RpGg:T8:

Hi, Little Powell, what is your source that the Antietam photo was taken after the battle? The Library of Congress website says this photo was taken "on the day of the battle." I've been looking for more interpretive info on this photo. thx

Check out Antietam: The Photographic Legacy of America's Bloody Day, by William A Frassanito. He breaks down, as best as anyone will probably ever be able to, not only when the photographers arrived but when they were working on various parts of the field. There were no photographers present during the battle.

It appears that no photos were ever taken during a battle, but has two interesting action photos. One is of ANV soldiers on the march through Frederick, Maryland in either 1862 or 1864 (site says 1862 but historians are unsure. The other shows Fifth Corps wagons moving toward the North Anna River in 1864; they appear in the background of the Grant and Meade photo.

Edit: The photo may be officially cataloged as being taken on September 17th, 1862. This only means that is what is written on the negative, and I say only because negative captions are notoriously unreliable.

The earliest known photograph depicting troops actually under fire was taken at the battle of Sedan, northern France in 1870 and shows a Prussian skirmish line advancing over a field. It was taken from some distance behind and above the troops from a nearby hilltop and the figures of the skirmishers are only just visible.

Possibly real:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_4QlVRfDC7rs/T ... 0sedan.jpg

There's also a clearly faked/staged photograph around supposedly of a French skirmish line attacking towards the camera but the moving figures are too sharply defined on it for the technology of the 1870s. It dates from around 1900.

Definitely staged (note camera is in exactly the same location):

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_4QlVRfDC7rs/T ... llenn0.jpg

There were some photos taken that actually show explosions from the bombardment of Fort Sumter in 1861. They were taken inside the fort. I'll have to dig up the book I saw them in (The Civil War in 3D) but there were some taken. I think there were some in the Crimean War as well.

That Antietam photo is also often mistaken for a combat photo but it was actually taken after the battle.[/quote]

Hi, Little Powell, what is your source that the Antietam photo was taken after the battle? The Library of Congress website says this photo was taken "on the day of the battle." I've been looking for more interpretive info on this photo. thx

http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c ... em_RpGg:T8:[/quote]

Boyd,
Check this site out, it's nothing but Sharpsburg, and it covers the battle in depth.

http://antietam.aotw.org/index.php

I don't believe there are any 'action' photos taken in the Crimea, the technology of the mid 1850s was just too cumbersome and primitive to be used while 'action' was going on, or to capture it; any movement was a blur. There are plenty of photos of troops posed in camp, or standing at fortifications and field defences, and even after action shots of some battlefields but there is concern even these were staged or mis-reported, such as the famous photo of cannonballs littering the "Valley of Death" after the charge of the light brigade. It seems fairly clear that the valley in the photo is merely a sunken lane or track not matching the ground the British cavalry advanced over and the roundshots are either 'overs' having rolled there for some distance or possibly something as mundane as having been thrown aside from a nearby ammo dump.

The nearest I have seen to an 'action' photo in the Crimea is a panorama shot of the port at Sevastopol with Allied cargo ships and warships unloading stores.

During the siege of Petersburg, cameramen took numerous photos of Union soldiers and fortifications on the front lines. Although none the surviving exposures show men under fire, several depict positions within reach of Confederate artillery. In some the point of view indicates that the camera was either on the ground or otherwise deployed to take advantage of shelter should the Confederates being firing.

Frassanito writes in Grant and Lee: The Virginia Campaigns that this photo http://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/32633 shows Fort Johnson, part of the Confederate line, just below the center horizon, making it the clearest photo of actively occupied Confederate works known to exist

Here are the photos I was referring to re:Fort Sumter. Did get the year wrong, they were taken in 1863.

If I remember correctly the article about the Crimean War photo was in Armchair General Magazine a while back. Basically there was a blur in the back corner of one of the photos of Sevastopol (I think) that people for years thought was smoke from something burning. Someone was digitizing the photos for a website and decided to analyze the blur and supposedly because of when the photo was taken and the location of the blur it was actually an explosion. When I get time (and over the flu) I'll have to dig around to see if I still have that issue here.