A Harvest of Death is the title of a photograph taken by Timothy H. O'Sullivan, sometime between July 4 and 7, 1863. It shows the bodies of soldiers killed at the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War, stretched out over part of the battlefield.
It is the result of a singular photographic project by entrepreneur Mathew Brady, who wished to give a realistic account of the conflict. However, when Timothy O'Sullivan photographed the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg, the deadliest engagement of the Civil War, he had recently distanced himself from his sponsor.
The photograph has given rise to a variety of analyses and interpretations, focusing on the realism of the image, the use of staging, and the representation of violence and corpses.
The Gettysburg Address, delivered by President Lincoln four months after the battle, contributed to the notoriety of the photograph. Despite the commercial failure of the photographers, the photograph gradually achieved celebrity and even status as a symbol of the Civil War, and as such was both celebrated and criticized.
Description Measuring 45.2 × 57.2 cm (17.79 x 22.51 inches), the albumen print (made by Alexander Gardner), from a collodion glass negative (O'Sullivan is the photographer), shows decomposing corpses on the battlefield. It is one of the most famous representations of the American Civil War. Published in the first American anthology of photographs, Alexander Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War, in 1865, it is part of a series of ten photographic plates of the Battle of Gettysburg, eight of which were taken by Timothy H. O'Sullivan.
The composition of the image shows a foreground of grassy meadow, immediately interrupted by a horizontal line of corpses. The swollen corpses have been stripped of their shoes, and one still has its mouth wide open. The corpses accumulate in the center of the image, the perspective framed by mist or smoke making it impossible for the viewer to distinguish or count them. The indistinct vanishing point indicates the scale of the battlefield and, consequently, the scale of this harvest of death. Whether by chance or by the photographer's deliberate choice, the image's composition is in keeping with the characteristics of landscape painting, inherited from the Renaissance.
The photograph is accompanied by a lengthy caption that reads as follows:
Context
Technique During the American Civil War, glass plates were exposed to wet collodion for five to twenty seconds, and had to be developed quickly after exposure. These constraints meant that a lot of equipment had to be transported to the shooting location in a cart. O'Sullivan's equipment appears incidentally in the far left of the photograph Confederate dead gathered for burial at the southwestern edge of the Rose woods, on the Gettysburg battlefield. The shot is taken as the soldiers' corpses begin their decomposition process, and the thousands of slaughtered horses are piled and burned nearby.
The photographic technique did not yet allow to capture the action or the moment—which is what cartoonists could do—nor did photography offer a synthesis like history painting.
Photographic project
O'Sullivan's biography is incomplete. As a teenager, he was recruited by Mathew Brady, a photographer and portraitist also known for his Civil War photographs. When the war began in 1861, he was most likely commissioned as a first lieutenant in the Union army. Alexander Gardner worked as a staff photographer for General George B. McClellan, commander of the Army of the Potomac. O'Sullivan became a photographer attached to the topographical engineers, copying maps and plans and taking photographs in his spare time. He and Gardner followed the Union forces from November 1861 to April 1862.
For American essayist and novelist Susan Sontag, O'Sullivan's photography is part of "the first large-scale attempt to document a war". Northern photographers Alexander Gardner and Timothy O'Sullivan collected for their employer Mathew Brady "conventional subjects, such as encampments populated by officers and infantrymen, towns on the warpath, munitions, ships", but above all dead Union and Confederate soldiers lying on the scorched ground of Gettysburg and Antietam. Access to the battlefield was a privilege granted to Brady and his team by Lincoln himself, but that did not mean the photographers were commissioned.
Brady proved to be an authoritarian boss: although he assembled 26 photographers to document the entire front, several of them, including Gardner and O'Sullivan, left the group in 1863 and formed their own teams, due to Brady's desire to take full credit for the expedition.
Photographer Sophie Delaporte links Mathew Brady's work to that of Roger Fenton in the Crimean War. For film historian Jérôme Bimbenet, on the other hand, Brady, Gardner and O'Sullivan's expedition is clearly different: "Unlike the Crimean War, where images were censored in advance because most of the photographers were on assignment on behalf of the government, the American Civil War was covered by a majority of private photographers whose aim was to commercialize the photographs".
Battle of Gettysburg
The Battle of Gettysburg, which took place between July 1–3, 1863 at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, ended in defeat for the Confederates, who lost the battlefield to the Unionists. Often regarded as the main turning point in the war, it was also the Civil War battle with the highest military losses: 28,000 men for the Confederates, 23,000 for the Unionists, well over a quarter of the total number of troops involved. For historian John Keegan, landscape and wooded terrain were the main factors behind this excess mortality, "as troops met by surprise, in a context of poor visibility, and found it difficult to disengage because of the dense vegetation." The good position of the Unionists, entrenched on the heights and heavily armed, left little chance for Confederate assaults.
It marked the failure of the offensive of the Army of Northern Virginia, commanded by General Lee, against General Meade's Army of the Potomac, and put an end to the invasion by Confederate troops of territories controlled by the Union.
Analysis and interpretation
Realism and history For Brady, photography is a moral duty: "the camera is the eye of history", he says. The demand for realism allows, if not requires, the showing of unpleasant and harsh facts. Thus, "at the outbreak of war, the American photographer's ambition is to record the history of the United States, focusing in particular on the daily lives of those involved in the conflict, from the general to the common soldier: he shows individuals above all, while erasing hierarchies." Because he financed his venture alone, Brady also hoped to make a considerable amount of money. For film historian Jérôme Bimbenet, it was probably the private initiative that enabled O'Sullivan's images to be both realistic and innovative - unlike under government commissioned work.
However, photographers didn't necessarily photograph their subjects as they found them. Photography remains a work of composition. With living subjects, one adopts a pose; with immobile corpses, as Susan Sontag points out, the photographer remains the one who arranges the elements in the image. Similarly, André Kaspi, an expert on the United States history, points out that to attract buyers of photographs, the Civil War photographer becomes a director, resorting to trickery.
Staging Through staging, photography becomes an element that can be manipulated for aesthetic, commercial or propagandistic purposes.
A Harvest of Death and Field where General Reynolds fell are plates 36 and 37 in the Photographic Sketch Book of the War, published in 1865. Their subject matter appears to be different: "The commentary on the first photograph describes rebel soldiers, who died attacking a patriot army and were abandoned on the battlefield. The second describes Union soldiers who died doing their duty." However, American historian William Frassanito was able to demonstrate that it was a single scene, taken from two different angles by Timothy O'Sullivan.
According to historian François Cochet, if "the same corpses are used both to honor Union soldiers who died doing their duty, and to [sic] describe rebels killed while mounting an assault on Northern patriots", it's because, in his view, "the rules of total media warfare were set as early as the American Civil War." For Héloïse Conésa, A Harvest of Death bears witness to a pioneering "falsification", as O'Sullivan seeks to "push the tragic dimension of his shooting to the extreme." In Gardner's album, other forms of staging are found, notably for the shot representing the body of a marksman. William Frassanito has studied six photographs of this dead soldier, taken by photographers Alexander Gardner and Timothy O'Sullivan on the Gettysburg battlefield in July 1863. Four of them are located on the southern slope of Devil's Den, the original location of the infantryman's body, probably killed as he mounted the assault: "After taking pictures of the dead soldier from several angles, the two photographers noticed the sniper's picturesque lair - forty yards away - and moved the corpse into this rocky niche to photograph it again. A blanket, visible beneath the soldier in another version of the sniper's den image, may have been used to carry the body."
According to Frassanito, the type of weapon shown in these photos was not used by marksmen, but was probably an accessory brought along by the photographer himself.
For historian François Cochet, this staging raises the question of the place and role of photography, as it shows "a deeply felt relationship with the 'truth', with the conviction, still widely shared, that 'it's true because it's been photographed'. This "truth", constructed and instrumentalized outside of any real administration of proof, is one of the essential dimensions of war photography."
Rejection of violence The image caption gives rise to parallel interpretations. For Monique Sicard, researcher at the CNRS, "the violence of the images gives rise to non-violent positions, already offering counter-examples to the hypotheses formulated as early as 1917 on the links between the violence of the scenes depicted and the delinquency of young people." The website of the international photojournalism festival Visa pour l'image points to a filiation in the rejection of violence, as Gardner and O'Sullivan "revealed the other side of the heroic decor of war by using photography to describe its dreadful details, publishing the very first images of battlefields strewn with corpses. [They] took up the torch from artists such as Jacques Callot and Goya, and paved the way for other photographers who made it their duty to denounce the horrors of war."
Photography historian François Brunet shows that this "photographic gospel", with its faith in the veracity of the image, pacifism and the power of images to transform the world, lasted well into the 1930s in the United States.
Changing representations: the figure of the battle For Hélène Puiseux, Director of Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, photographs of the Crimean War, and even more clearly those of the American Civil War, helped redefine the figure of the battle, and she describes its genealogy: "When photography was born, the battle had been inscribed for several centuries both in military reality as a strategic model [...] and in cultural representations. The term [battle] hands on the same plate both the reality to the military and the fiction of that reality, afterwards, to everyone."