Art Institute of Chicago

Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Gettysburg

Alexander Gardner

Date

July 1863

Medium

Albumen print, pl. 41 from the album "Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War, vol. 1" (1866)

Culture

United States

Department

Photography and Media

Institution

Art Institute of Chicago

Alexander Gardner documented America’s Civil War, concentrating on scenes in camp as well as the tragic aftermath of fighting. After the war, in 1865, he published Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War, two volumes of 50 prints each accompanied by floridly written descriptions of the scenes he and his photographic staff had witnessed. At Gettysburg—one of the deadliest battles, and a turning point in the conflict—he made the now iconic photograph of a Confederate sharpshooter in his final resting place. In recent years this picture has invited controversy, as historians have argued that Gardner and his assistants, wishing to heighten the impact of the image, moved the corpse, also seen in another photograph in the Sketch Book, and that the gun was in fact the photographer’s and not the soldier’s.

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