About this item
Second only to Mathew Brady as the foremost early American photographer was Alexander Gardner, the one-time manager of Bradys Washington salon and Bradys chief photographer in the field during the early days of the Civil War. Indeed, Gardner - who later photographed the War independently - often managed the famous horse-drawn photographic laboratory and took many of the pictures that used to be attributed to Brady. He accompanied the Union troops on their marches, their camps and bivouacs, their battles, and on their many hasty retreats and routs during the early days of the War. In 1866 Alexander Gardner published a very ambitious two-volume work which contained prints of some 100 photographs which he had taken in the field. A list of them reads like a roster of great events and great men: Antietam Bridge under Travel, President Lincoln (and McClellan) at Antietam, Pinkerton and His Agents in the Field, Ruins of Richmond, Libby Prison, McLeans House Where Lees Surrender Was Signed, Meades Headquarters at Gettysburg, Battery D, Second U.S. Artillery in Action at Fredericksburg, the Slaughter Pen at Gettysburg, and many others. This publication is now amoung the rarest American books, and is here for the first time republished inexpensively. Gardners photographs are among the greatest war pictures ever taken and are also among the most prized records of American history. Gardner was quite conscious of recording history, and spared himself no pains or risk to achieve the finest results. His work indicates a technical mastery that now seems incredible when one bears in mind the vicissitudes of collodion applications in the field, wet plates, long exposures, long drying times, imperfect chemicals - plus enemy bullets around the photographers ears. It has been said of these photographs: photography today . . . is far easier, but it is no better.
About the Author
I spent most of my childhood in the woods at the edge of the Champlain Valley of Vermont. My childhood ambition was to be a farmer, but I went to Marlboro College to study Art and wound up writing on Philosophy and Religion. After graduating I made several trips to Asia, backpacking in the Himalaya or staying with monks in the recently-cleared jungle of South India. It was a time when a person could slip into Tibet without trouble and go anywhere, hitchhiking or jumping a bus. In between trips I earned a Masters degree in American History from the University of Vermont, where I wrote about Christian Fundamentalism. The topic of my doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan was the so-called twenty-five great sites of eastern Tibet and the triad of great lamas Jamgon Kongtrul, Khyentse Wangpo, and Chokgyur Lingpa. I wrote it in the Rose Reading Room at the New York Public Library, and was lucky when I finished, in 2006, to land a post-doctoral fellowship at the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center under the legendary Gene Smith. For that I had the pleasure of sitting in the Rubin Museum, and from there I moved up the street to work for Shelley and Donald Rubin, for whom, among other things, I helped create the Treasury of Lives, an on-line biographical encyclopedia of Tibet and Central Asia which I continue to run. For the past 15 years I've lived in New York City and Callicoon, NY with my cryptographer husband Rosario Gennaro, my daughter Matilde and my son Giuseppe.
