It's the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War. Big Think takes a look at 150-year-old photographs.
From the piece...
It’s not easy to imagine today in our world of high-speed photography and camera phones what it was like to have your photograph taken in the 19th century. The still very new technology required sitters to remain motionless for long periods—sometimes several minutes—for the image to be captured by the plate. Any movement would blur the image. This year marks the sesquicentennial of the beginning in April 1861 of the American Civil War, the first American armed conflict to be caught on camera. A new exhibition of Civil War photos at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, opens up a family album of sorts to show us the forgotten figures of that conflict—the everyday people unheralded by history books, but who look much more like us today than the larger-than-life leaders we all know by name.
It’s tempting to imagine these people as forever unsmiling wraiths inhabiting a cold, gray world. The difficulty of maintaining a smile for the necessary duration when in front of a camera prevented most people from even trying. (The period’s hit-or-miss dental practice didn’t help either.) They always seem more like statues than people—stern and rigid, as if already dead before the shooting even began. Mathew Brady and other famous photographers of the period usually photographed either living leaders such as Lincoln or Grant or photographed the dead scattered about the battlefields. (Brady actually moved dead soldiers sometimes to choreograph the specific look he wanted.) The Liljenquist Collection recently put on display shows neither leaders nor the dead, but rather the living frozen in time in the photos.
“Have you ever seen a photograph of a person you knew you would never forget? Has a photograph influenced you to change your opinion on an important issue?"
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