A Day in September: The Battle of Antietam and the World It Left Behind

by Stephen Budiansky

He never showed corpses decapitated or disemboweled or missing limbs, much less any that had been partially devoured by marauding pigs or dogs, an occurrence often remarked on by soldiers. Scarcely any of his photographs dwell on the wounded and their mutilations and agonies. And, as some remarkable detective work by the photographic historian William Frassanito discovered, in later battles (Gettysburg in particular) Gardner had clearly dragged corpses around the battlefield to pose them to his artistic satisfaction, always to conform to some idealized representation of death. One has to look closely at his images of dead soldiers at Antietam to notice one of the grimmer but unremarked-on realities that his photographs did sometimes capture: the inside-out-pockets of the Confederate dead, showing that their corpses had been systematically looted.