Antietam (Sharpsburg, Maryland)

Seven years ago, David and I spent his birthday weekend of September 14 in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. While there, we took an excursion to Antietam Battlefield, which I wrote about here. 

Today, Heather Cox Richardson wrote about that battle, in which, over the course of twelve hours, some 3,500 soldiers on both sides were killed, with 19,000 wounded or missing. Although it was a turning point in the Civil War, as she points out (and has written a book about), the war is still, in essence, raging. White supremacy has not died. Far from it.

She states that the

slaughter was brought home to northern families in a novel way after the battle. Photographer Alexander Gardner, working for the great photographer Matthew Brady, brought his camera to Antietam two days after the guns fell silent. Until Gardner’s field experiment, photography had been limited almost entirely to studios. People sent formal photos home and recorded family images for posterity, as if photographs were portraits.
     Taking his camera outside, Gardner recorded seventy images of Antietam for people back home. His stark images showed bridges and famous generals, but they also showed rows of bodies, twisted and bloating in the sun as they awaited burial. By any standards these war photos were horrific, but to a people who had never seen anything like it before, they were earth-shattering. . . .
     “The dead of the battle-field come up to us very rarely, even in dreams,” one reporter mused. “We see the list in the morning paper at breakfast, but dismiss its recollection with the coffee. There is a confused mass of names, but they are all strangers; we forget the horrible significance that dwells amid the jumble of type.” But Gardner’s photographs erased the distance between the battlefield and the home front. They brought home the fact that every name on a casualty list “represents a bleeding, mangled corpse.” “If [Gardner] has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it,” the shocked reporter commented.

Here are some of Gardner's photos. They might not seem so shocking to us nowadays—though they should. All war photos, or photos of desperate refugees, or of crowded refugee camps, or of starving children the world over, should, by God, shock us. The inhumanity that humankind is capable of—for what reason?—should shock us.

Here are a few photos taken today, of Haitians in Del Rio, Texas, "creating a humanitarian emergency and a logistical challenge U.S. agents describe as unprecedented," as the Seattle Times puts it. Photography tells a story like no words really can.