Gettysburg 3D Photo Tour

[Music] wow I'm really happy to not only be here with Louis palu Louie who are you first of all uh I'm a photographer and I've covered boring Conflict for about 10 years I've been a photographer about 28. so a modern war photographer here not only in the Gettysburg Battlefield but arguably at one of the most documented places at Gettysburg during the Civil War certainly the most documented single farm at Gettysburg in terms of War photography this is the Rose farm what do you know about this place well this is the place that most of the most famous pictures from Alexander Gardner and Timothy Sullivan came out of the photography after after the battle here in Gettysburg good so and and what happens is in 1967 after a years-long search my mentor William a frasenito the mentor of many people actually eventually discovered this book and let it discovered this location that a lot of photos were taken here and took a nicer book than my particularly beat up copy and published Gettysburg a journey in time and blew open uh where these photos were taken and really destroyed a lot of myths that these were not dead of the iron Brigade they were not dead of the first Minnesota they were in fact dead taken on a nondescript Farm here at getty sure yeah I think that's really important to have all the facts and uh to correct or amend history that for its accuracy for sure yeah and this is your first time specifically out here is that right this is the first time on this part of the battlefield definitely let's do this right now we're gonna do a little walkabout and this is a great place to start I think you've seen this photo before right so let's actually Orient this way if we can okay now if you look at it this way again these photos are all taken in 3D so they're taking a low to the ground and what I can see here is a line of bodies here and another line of bodies there and if I look over on the left I can see a distinctive crack in a low Boulder you see that crack right there totally okay how do I know this well frasenito in 1967 came out and was looking for this Boulder right here which if you look right over there yeah there it is okay and um you can see some of the other ones so once he had this as sort of the Rosetta Stone he knew that the line of bodies was right here there was another line and a guy with a bent knee caught his attention he'd already recognized that he could see this same guy in several different photos so what I want to do now is walk over to some of the other photos taken of this particular group here so let's go now as we walk I'd like to hand out um 3D glasses here because most Civil War photos 80 or more were recorded in 3D I think that's a fantastic fact that a lot of these everything's 3D is a modern thing I love anything that that causes people to ask questions okay so now first before you put them on okay check this out so you can see that rock on the left it's clearly that same boulder there yeah we know it because the guy with the bent knee is right there and we know it but when you take these 3D photos and again let me stress the photographers had no thoughts other than that people would only see these in 3D not on big boards with red and blue glasses but rather through stereo viewers stereoscopes like you know we've all seen in our parents and grandparents houses and they're still available now don't bid against me um but when you put them on they turn into like little windows in time and suddenly you're looking back into the past and right from where you are Louie I think you can see that the Boulder almost lines up oh yeah well I think also it's about experientiality right it's about this being a window to a place a lot of people can't go yeah what else do you see here seeing this for the first time well I just got to get past the fact that I'm seeing it in three dimensions because it photo in many ways photographs are troops but they're not the real thing they're just they're things that help our imagination see something that we can't see in person and I think that or an experience and when I look here I mean there's no way those trees can be the same trees I guess correct so they're different trees uh there's a boulder if you look off in the distance you can see a distant set of woods those are in the exact same yeah actually and then there's that fold in the ground there yeah which you'd never be able to see in two Dimensions properly right totally now let me ask you a question so here's a photo Alexander Gardner took one of many on this particular farm when you record a photo at a place does that place hold any particular emotion or otherwise for you well I think it all depends what narrative has been given to you I think a lot of what happens in the news in any history or of any kind or storytelling is the power of narrative and the use of narrative to change something into something it is not or into something that the author wants you to to experience and I think that by photographing it here it gives there's there's Dimension here and that that that may have driven the way the photographs were taken good very interesting and you can see yes undulations on the ground you couldn't otherwise see now let's keep this same group of bodies in mind okay and you can see now that it's not exactly a line of bodies there's a few people that are further away yeah um and by the way we can talk about who these men were or to what we know about it but let's walk on over here as well and we can now look at these from another Direction so now what we're doing is focusing in upon the guy with the bent knee yeah I call him the guy with the bent knee because we don't know who he is we can only guess as to which state he was even from other than that he's Confederate and probably died on the second day at the Battle of Gettysburg but we're now looking not only at the first line of bodies but you can see the second line of bodies next to that same boulder we started at and then of course you can see Gardner's dark room wagon you know what that is seeing it in 3D is very very different because I'm kind of looking into the wagon and the initial shock is the dead bodies and then as a photographer I'm like wow what have you gotten this darkum wagon back there well what's interesting of course is you know a lot of people have trouble wrapping their brains around it that darkroom wagon is in there and this photo was recorded it was I'm sorry developed in that darkroom wagon yeah um you know how about you know on a normal day I think so Gardner was particularly productive here um 14 photos taken known to have been taken on the Rose farm um that's a pretty productive four or five hours for Gardener okay how would you cover this place knowing if there were 44 bodies around here how many photos would you take on a shoot like this in half a day well I think you know we need to establish a couple of things is uh Gardner Timothy O'Sullivan and Matthew Brady were not journalists I'm a photojournalist so I could not move the bodies around it's like we have a code of ethics we follow so I think the first thing is is I would photograph things as they are I mean some sometimes it'd be about documenting a detail but there I do a wide shot like a landscape I would not include my dark room I mean maybe for myself or for history to show process uh but I think that uh the difficulty back then is to know the Carnage that happened here and to take a photo and there's only one body I think the feeling was we are just not capturing what really happened here and it was you know it's always easy to have this hindsight of History like oh they move the bodies that's not ethical I can't believe that they set it up but I think that these these were were people who are breaking you ground in some ways they were the beginning and they were they were because it was 3D uh I think that there are things that they needed to happen in the photograph to create the dimension and the depth how would I photograph well I think I would have probably covered the fighting I would have I would have had the technology if that was back then obviously I'd work with what I had but I would with the technology back then you can't cover the fighting the exposures are 20 seconds to five minutes uh and it's aftermath photography you wouldn't even know that the battle had happened really you'd already be too late um but uh what what is interesting here is I think what he's trying to convey is the level of Carnage in this war and I think that we have to all of us have to transport ourselves back in time and understand that you know seeing photos of dead bodies especially in this particular fight over these particular ideas political and ethical uh to connect the pictures of the actual killing going on would have been shocking to the public yes more so than now because now we go to Instagram and we see millions of photographs every day back then it would have been like an oh my God and in some ways it could have steered public opinion and it really was sort of a mythbuster right because you know you have people you know before the Battle of Antietam thinking war was a pretty glorious event there was no actual depiction of it so maybe if you died your ancestor your I'm sorry your loved one would be on a parapet with a flag draped across his breast maybe a little blood on him you know but all of a sudden the Battle of Antietam happens and Gardner got there with his photos and at least one journalist famously said if Mr Gardner has not dragged the bodies to our doorsteps and place them in our door yard he has done something very like it it's it's one of the most important parts of the history of photography what ends up happening first in Antietam and then following up to here is that there is a a manner of recording an event or the the effects or or in this case the dead bodies of this battle that brings the reality of War to the public and I think that that's a huge moan in the history of photography and of the history of this country where it is the beginning of what we see later in other Wars like say in Vietnam or the the pictures from I believe it's terroir paellu with the dead Marines on the beach where it's just a shock to the public like this is what it this is the human cost of what this conflict's costing us yeah and this is let's walk to the next spot you know this is new ground as you said right so you know there are no rules for this is it okay to photograph dead soldiers are you allowed to play I don't think yeah I don't think people know you know and yeah then and now there aren't rules what I want to address too is that you might think that these photos they're so terrible everyone's going to call for a halting of the war which some people did right yeah but others including Abraham Lincoln said no these dead must not have died in vain we need to continue the struggle to make sure that this sacrifice wasn't in vain so you know even swaying public opinion can work in both directions no definitely so so what we're looking at here is what I would call now the famous v formation in other words the Confederates laid their friends out for burial here but were unable to complete the process so the union had to come and do it after they controlled this part of the battlefield these were almost certainly Georgians maybe South Carolinians but all but certainly Georgians here and they're laid out in a V what's interesting here is that not only can they be connected to all the other bodies because there's three different photos of the V right here but the two Boulders that you see right here are still visible inside the fence line over there if you were to walk over to them this is how far as needle lined this location up now if we were to walk over there too we would see there's some substantial erosion here that's because these dead were buried right here where they fell that's what they did in the Civil War and they were later exhumed in this case moved to Southern cemeteries in North Carolina South Carolina and Virginia and for some of the Dead on the Rose farm we actually know who they are and where they're buried now well you know as a photographer some of the things they start looking at is like their shoes and their or lack of or or falling apart Footwear and it kind of tells you a lot of you know how they dress what their uniforms look like and I think that the important thing is that you know you could see the the the size of the wounds these are all important things to understand the kind of War and the kind of weapons they were using back at that time and and I think it's tough here to see but in 3D you can certainly see it this Soldier again who charged into battle full of life just four days before this photo was taken they look like grotesque forms now but his head has somehow been split it's a particularly gruesome wound you can see something's going on there well and you can see where something had hit him right here and I think you know it talks about the the Carnage and the the sort of you know it's incredible one of the things that hit me when I looked at some of the The Monuments I first got here from a residency is how many horses were killed here and I've been looking for more and more pictures of horses I mean they're not the numbers very wildly like over a million horses killed in the Civil War and I just imagine uh it's it's in some ways we're lucky that they actually documented something here but I imagine if say they were shot another 50 to 100 class plates I wish well just of of you know the the detress of War I mean I can't imagine the photographer arriving and just the shock like portraits of of of whoever buries the dead would have been powerful maybe a lot of African Americans doing sort of that that work and I just think it would talk about sort of all the layers of conflict I think what's interesting uh as well is there's that famous picture of the Confederate prisoners yes and I wonder a debate I posted it as an event house I was gonna a lecture I was going to give and a debate broke out of of how they're posing how they look and I'm just like maybe there were Union guys dressed up in UniFi we don't know in the end we really can't say or we don't know we don't know and uh although a lot of people Proclaim to know for sure well that's the whole thing and in the end uh that's why think works works like this book by frasenito are really really key because I think that in the end it's about going to the place and that's what my job is I go to a place and I document what I'm seeing and you can look at me up as an author of the person who created it and I think that's what's important about Gardner and all of this is Gardner is working as an employee under Matthew Brady uh the Antietam photos are taken all the credit maybe in some cases I guess later on Gardner gets credit but everybody thought they were Matthew Brady's photos it was like he was an employee so I figured this day yeah to this day and he breaks off and I think authorship it's it's a really important part of the history of photography or anything is that knowing who actually made it and who was a part of the process was key and Gardner broke it down and photographers worked for him like Timothy O'Sullivan he credited him who made the print who made the negative and I think that having all of that is important to understand the key facts that you can follow up on and by the way just taking photos and dividing them into series is one of the most important things that frasenito did in other words once you know who took it and wonder where it was taken yeah that photo has left the Fine Arts field to an extent and become a historical document we know when Gardner was here therefore we found he found that Gardner was the only one to record the dead here we know what parts of the battlefield was on it can help us understand history a little better no totally and I just think of I mean there's a lot more than just even taking the pictures like Gardner would have to have a very extensive list of contacts to find out what's going on how to talk to people who he knew and what Army and at what level that is an important part of working logistically as a photographer in a war zone as taking you can't take the photographs and there's a lot of layers you got to get through picket line security they could think you're a spy how do you explain your way around that what documents do you have how can you say hey look I'm not a spy you know if you get held up by the Confederates in some ways just because of where you're from even if you're not a part of the other side of a combatant they may say how do we know you're not spying on us you know Justice Alexander Gardner did just several miles south of here exactly and he probably talked his way through and said look I am you know Alexander Gardner I don't know what he I would have loved to know I don't know if he wrote it anywhere how how he did talk no there's frustratingly little in fact what we really have as with most many photographers we have his caption of a photo of the place where he was detained by the Confederates we know they let him go we know when the photo was taken yeah we don't know a whole lot more than that but at least we have what we have and we can follow it up and I I championed Gardner a lot because if he would not have left Matthew Brady he would have just thought okay I worked for this guy I don't care if I get credited then a lot of this history would have been lost and I think that in some ways what by breaking off from Brady who is equally as important uh for for the the whole Civil War and photographing it is he he starts breaking down the things that have given us even the small amounts of information that we do have one other thing I want to point out on this photo is there's so many gruesome elements but somehow this one speaks to me again remember these are just this is these are somebody's brother dad husband um and and if you look all the way down the list here you can see a guy who's one his eyes are actually bulging out of his head and I mean again I just can't stress enough imagine if this is your relative somebody back probably in Georgia is awaiting you know word of this poor soldier's fate yeah and and you know and again and and many of them are going to be disappointed before long when their father brother husband doesn't come home after this it's easy enough to look at these people um as sort of these grotesque forms but no they're just like us suppose you know that photographing these places yes no and I just think you know kind of I I think of Walt Whitman's incredible writing about the Civil War and I just think of if Walt Whitman would have been able to write about the process of photographing it and that experience of you know that moment where you stop and you they move the bodies around and how what the smell would have been like I mean I I've covered War so I know and it's something that stays with you psychologically and it just that that's part of the the story or narrative doesn't exist sort of the aftermath of of of the photographer's experience of seeing all this Carnage because there is no preparation for them psychologically what they're going to see and experience nothing at all and this was brand new I mean documentary photography at least in my opinion was really born the year before on the Virginia Peninsula yeah and then those of the Dead didn't come around until late that year and then all of a sudden it's happening with a little bit more frequency it is a very big jump from you know daguerre and and fox Talbot inventing or whoever did it first around the same time the the photography itself and it's kind of like you know the painting is dead you know and it's yeah and that's where photography and then you jump to this of how photography uses a tool to record things that have happened to tell people hey oh my God I think what's really important to understand is that Gardner is following a tradition of documenting scenes of battle that date back to Francisco Goya the Spanish painter when he did etchings called the disasters of war and these were all allegedly documented scenes of atrocities and scenes of War committed by the Napoleonic Army when they invaded Spain and in some ways and their etchings so you could make multiple copies of them they had a plate you know and I think that that's the incredible part of Photography is that you know he would Alexander Gardner came here and and everybody's including illustrators and could use a lot of these photographs as reference to to show what it looked like it wasn't just an imagined scene anymore or an imagined creation from writing in some ways this this takes photography and equals it to writing in a lot of ways because I would come here as a writer and like you know this many bodies I write down the facts and now we can actually see it and I think that that is a transformative moment in American history

Channel: American Battlefield Trust

Views: 24,370

Keywords: American Battlefield Trust, Civil War Trust, gettysburg photography, civil war photography, gettysburg tour, garry adelman gettysburg

Id: UuNobxG85WU

Length: 19min 5sec (1145 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 24 2023