"Rare, eerie photos of the Civil War from Matthew Brady and Alexander Gardner"

[Houmes]

"We now look back at the Civil War with a curious fascination detached from the gruesome reality of the death and destruction afforded us by the 150 years that have passed.

"Much of what we know about the conflict comes from the pioneering work of a small group of early photographers.

"In 1861, President Abraham Lincoln himself granted permission to allow a Washington photographer access to battle sites to document the war.

"That photographer, Matthew Brady, and his employees, including Alexander Gardner, documented warfare in a way that almost no one had done before."

http://www.ctpost.com/news/article/150-y...186407.php

The second photograph in the series--of a Confederate sharpshooter killed in Devil's Den at Gettysburg--is an iconic image of the Civil War. The only problem is that it's a fake. Alexander Gardner dragged the body (probably an infantryman) into postion and placed a rifle against the wall as a prop to make the composition of the photograph more impressive. Both the rifle and the body had been used in other photographs, but this was unknown until first pointed out by Frederic Ray in a 1961 article in Civil War Times.