Alexander Gardner (photographer)

The Dead of Antietam, 1862 Alexander Gardner and his assistant James Gibson photographed the bodies still lying on the field after Antietam, and the pictures went on show at Mathew Brady's gallery in New York that October, where they drew crowds. The New York Times wrote that Brady had brought home the terrible reality and earnestness of war. Press shorthand credited the series to Brady, whose name was on the gallery, though Gardner and Gibson made the exposures. The pictures belong here as the first photographs of American battlefield dead to go on public show, putting the war's cost in front of people who had only read about it.