Lens of War

Lens of War is the most recent publication in the University of Georgia Press's innovative UnCivil Wars series that includes other books devoted to the Civil War's environmental disaster; its widespread material destruction; its cowardice, knavery, and scavenging; its unseemly freaks; and even its amputated limbs. In this volume, J. Matthew Gallman and Gary W. Gallagher asked twenty-seven historians to choose a single Civil War photograph and reflect on it in a short essay. The result is a curious accumulation—a collection of essay sketches, each a glimpse or vignette of an aspect of the war through famous (and sometimes not-so-famous) pictures. The book contains no overriding narrative, sustained argument, or even an exploration of established themes—the editors suggest the essays can be read in any order—but instead provides a series of idiosyncratic and often-personal views. The pronoun “I” appears repeatedly. Lens of War is divided into five categories: leaders, soldiers, civilians, victims, and places. Although the main historical materials are photographs, which, as unique forms of representation, might invite a different kind of categorization, the vignettes are placed within a more familiar historiographic framework for the war. Those collected in the leaders section are, perhaps unsurprisingly, among the most conventional, in several instances bordering on the hagiographic. We view Alexander Gardner's famous 1865 close-up portrait of Lincoln, Mathew Brady's portrait of Ulysses S. Grant in 1864 after the Battle of Cold Harbor, Robert E. Lee on his horse Traveller, and Jeb Stuart in Confederate finery; in the accompanying essays we witness the rapture that these figures continue to cultivate in contemporary viewers. Several of the authors recall nostalgically how, as youngsters, they first came upon the pictures and how such moments of early delight and curiosity, even puzzlement and discomfort, led them to careers as historians. Reading such entries, one is constantly reminded of Roland Barthes's claim that photographs can carry a punctum, the tiny, almost-incidental details within pictures that rivet the gaze and become deeply mesmerizing and achingly personal—or, as he notoriously put it, the images harbor the “accident which pricks me, but also bruises me” (Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 1980, p. 27

Ancient history · Archaeology · Argument (complex analysis · Art · Art history · Battle · Cowardice · Indignation · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Portrait · Representation (politics · Spanish Civil War · American History and Culture · History · Law · Photography and Visual Culture