The Photographer and the President by Richard Lowry

Author:Richard Lowry [Lowry, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8478-4547-7
Publisher: Rizzoli
Published: 2015-09-28T16:00:00+00:00

Dedication Ceremonies, by Alexander Gardner, Gettysburg, November 19, 1863 (illustrations credit 3.17)

ONE account of Lincoln’s speech tells of the crowd’s distraction by a photographer hurrying to get his camera in place to capture the president, only to have the remarks end too soon. It is possible that the photographer was Gardner or one of his assistants, though likely not. The Library of Congress holds three stereo card negatives attributed to Gardner taken of the crowd at a distance from some sort of platform. On the left horizon rises the gate to the Evergreen Cemetery; to the right is a tent where the sixty-nine-year-old Everett had rested before his oration. The speaker platform stood just to the left of the tent, about halfway between the tent and gateway. One of the negatives has received particular attention of late as scholars have debated whether one or neither of two figures in the picture is that of the president. Gardner was one of at least half a dozen photographers, including two from Brady’s Washington gallery, who took pictures of the ceremony. Many of the images are since lost; only one, attributed most commonly to David Bachrach, shows Lincoln clearly, looking down and bareheaded while listening to Everett’s speech.

It is not likely at that distance that Gardner would have bothered to photograph Lincoln; nor is he likely to have heard the president’s words. If he did hear them or read the address later in the papers, they may well have struck a chord in him. The president and the photographer were thinking along similar lines. For Lincoln, Gettysburg represented the whole of “the great civil war,” just as O’Sullivan’s exposure of “A Harvest of Death” spoke to more than what happened on the Union right flank. More broadly, both of them put the relationship of the living to the battlefield dead at the crux of the nation’s experience of war. In confronting his viewers with the uncanny ugliness of death, Gardner bore witness to the inexorable responsibility the living have to those who died. In word and deed, Lincoln gave direction to this responsibility. He urged that only by dedicating itself to its highest ideals can the nation properly value the fallen. And by participating in even just a symbolic way in the communal rite of burial at the ceremony, he inspired the thousands who had clogged the roads and railways to get there, many of whom, according to reporters, had lost sons and husbands and brothers and friends in the battle. His presence and his words bound their personal suffering to that of the soldiers in the field, forging the beginnings of a national community that looked to the future.

If he did read the address, Gardner may also have felt he had a small part in shaping Lincoln’s vision. Among the many “VIEWS OF THE WAR” that Gardner advertised in his gallery would have been those freshly printed from Gettysburg. It is hard to imagine his not taking a few moments on at

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