tballardbrown:

A Black And White 1860s Fundraiser : The Picture Show

At a glance, they look like any other Civil War-era vignettes and portraits of children kneeling in prayer or cloaked in the U.S. flag. But, there’s more to these pictures than meets the eye. 

Photo: Library of Congress

Photos Courtesy of Ron Coddington

The impulses to collect and to doodle have always been in Rod Coddington’s blood. As a kid, it was baseball cards. As a teen, he took an interest in old flea market photos — and simultaneously became “obsessed,” he says, “with learning to draw the human face.”

That explains a lot. Coddington kicked off a career in journalism as an illustrator doing caricatures — eventually growing into the position of art director at USA Today.These days, he’s the head of the data visualization and multimedia team at The Chronicle of Higher Education. And he’s still collecting.

African-American Faces Of The Civil War

Photo Credit: Claire O’Neill/NPR

Believe it or not, there’s a lot of food involved in wet-plate photography. Egg whites (albumen) are used to make the glass plates adhesive to the light-sensitive chemicals. And one way to keep the plates from drying out after processing is to coat them in honey. It’s also physically demanding, so you get really hungry.

These are the things I learned in the field with wet-plate photographer Todd Harrington. For the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Antietam, we asked him to retrace the steps of Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner. We wanted to capture the same scenes with the same equipment — to see how things have changed. (Kind of like the nerd’s version of Dear Photograph.)

Same Camera, Different Century: Capturing Civil War Sites, 150 Years Later

Photo Credit: Todd Harrington and Library Of Congress

Today’s 150th anniversary of the Battle of Antietam got us thinking: What if Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner could revisit some of the original sites he photographed? If he used his equipment today, what would the images look like? That is: How have the landscapes changed — or stayed the same?

Re-Tracing The Steps Of A Civil War Photographer

nprfreshair:

A Civil War in the Olive Garden Parking Lot