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View Full Version : This famous photo was likely staged



Mister D
12-11-2012, 04:53 PM
1083

This guy makes a persuasive argument, IMO.

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Take a close look at this photograph. It was taken on the 19th of September 1862, two days after the battle, and presumably these poor fellows have been left while the Union buried and tended to their own fallen comrades? All the bodies are lying on their backs as if turned over for either identification or to test if anyone of them was still breathing. The Hagerstown Road is on the right, between the two rows of fences on either side of the road. Fighting on this part of the battlefield was particularly severe. General Joe Hooker, commanding the Union First Army Corps stated that:


We had not proceeded far before I discovered that a heavy force of the enemy had taken possession of a corn – field (I have since learned about a thirty acre field), in my immediate front, and from the sun’s rays falling on their bayonets projecting above the corn could see that the field was filled with the enemy, with arms in their hands, standing apparently at ‘support arms.’ Instructions were immediately given for the assemblage of all my spare batteries near at hand, of which I think there were five or six, to spring into battery on the right of the field, and open with canister at once. In the time I am writing every stalk of corn in the northern and greater part of the field was cut as closely as could have been done with a knife, and the slain lay in rows precisely as they had stood in their ranks a few moments before...My command followed the fugitives closely until we had passed the corn – field a quarter of a mile or more...[6] (http://thepoliticalforums.com/#_ftn6)

Attack and counter attack ebbed and flowed over the cornfield and across the Hagerstown Road yet, in Gardner’s photograph, not a single rail is out of place on either side of the road. There are no signs of any small arms or artillery damage to any of the posts or rails of the fence, not even a mark of splintered wood, and this ground was supposedly not only within range of Hooker’s guns, but also of other Union batteries bought up to the outskirts of the East Wood!

We must remember that Gardner is now known for “staging” his compositions, in particular his, Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, taken after the battle of Gettysburg in 1863. Gardner moved the body of a dead Confederate and positioned it among the boulders in Devils Den for more dramatic effect, catering for the morbid and at times ghoulish obsession with sentimentality and death that prevailed during those times.

At Sharpsburg Gardner most probably had the corpses (which may have been already collected together for burial) deposited at an undamaged section of the road where he required them to stage his photograph. No other living person is in the frame, movement causing distortion and ghosting on the plates used at the time, and the ground itself seems remarkably fresh considering it was crossed and re - crossed by hundreds, if not thousands of men, together with artillery limbers and horses. I leave it to the readers of this article to make up their own minds.

http://www.battlefieldanomalies.com/sharpsburg/index.htm

Mister D
12-11-2012, 04:59 PM
I've been to the Antietam battlefield twice. It is one of the most interesting and exciting battle that ever occured in North America, IMO.