Landscapes Of The Civil War : Newly Discovered Photographs from the Medford Historical Society

Rating:
Summary: Great Stuff, but We've Seen It Already
Review: It's painful to describe the things that are wrong with this book. It should be far better. Best feature: it's beautifully printed. The photographic reproduction is superb. Worst features: the titles and the selection of pictures. The main title, "Landscapes of the Civil War," is incorrect because most of the photographs aren't landscapes, even in the loosest interpretation of the word. In accordance with the techniques of the period, most are pictures of people posed for the camera. This kind of picture, naturally, is generally of far greater historical interest than an actual landscape. While it's useful to know what the countryside looked like before battle struck - and afterwards as well - these points are generally far down the list. The subtitle, "Newly Discovered Photographs from the Medford [MA] Historical Society," is positively misleading. The photos are part of a hoard of more than 5000 prints found in the Society's attic in 1990. This was a truly remarkable find, and the photographs are valuable indeed. But the modifier "Newly Discovered" deliberately suggests that these are photographs of the war that we've never seen before. This emphatically is not true. As a wild guess, at least 90% are in the National Archives and available on that agency's Website. Many are readily found too in Dover's fine reprints of the work of Russell, Barnard, Brady and Gardner. To be fair, acknowledgment is given in "Landscapes" to some of these other printings. But the subtitle is so deceptive it's unworthy of the subject matter. I find the choice of pictures extremely strange. Most of them are thoroughly familiar to any Civil War buff - which is not to diminish their value and interest. Was there so little new in that Medford attic? Some shots, where the subject is so far away that no information is conveyed, are poor even by the standards of the time. The editor, Constance Sullivan, actually includes a few genuine landscapes (Barnard's at Lookout Mountain, for example), but these are boring even to the most enthusiastic collector of Civil War photographs. A final impression, which I haven't checked with care. Prints made from damaged plates show the same defects here that are found in other published printings. They weren't made before the negatives were injured. This book not only presents nothing new, it gives us the familiar flaws we're so eager NOT to find in favorite photographs. It's splendid that Medford has these pictures. But the major shortcoming of the book is that nearly everyone else who wants them has them too.