Biography|Alexander Gardner — The Antietam Plates Went Up Under Another Man's Name

Alexander Gardner reached the Antietam battlefield on 19 September 1862, two days after the fighting ended, with his assistant James Gibson and a wagon of glass plates.

Born in Paisley, Scotland, in 1821, he was running Mathew Brady's Washington gallery at the time.

The two made a series of exposures across the field, the dead among them, and returned for a second set about two weeks later.

By October the prints were hanging in Brady's National Portrait Gallery here at 785 Broadway, on the corner of Tenth Street, under the title The Dead of Antietam.

The New York Times reviewed the show on 20 October 1862, under the headline "Brady's Photographs: Pictures of the Dead at Antietam."

Its most-quoted sentence: "If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards and along the streets, he has done something very like it."

The same review describes crowds constantly going up the stairs, then bending over the views of the battlefield.

The "he" throughout is Brady. Gardner is not named anywhere in the notice, and neither is Gibson.

That was the studio's practice — every plate made by Brady's field operators went out credited to Brady. The Metropolitan Museum of Art records that Gardner was deeply offended by it, and dates his break with Brady to November 1862, within weeks of the exhibition.

He left with much of the field staff and opened his own gallery in Washington.

Then he fixed the record in print. Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War, published in 1865–66, ran 100 albumen views and named the maker of every one; the Met counts eleven photographers credited by name.

Brady's gallery has not stood at this corner for well over a century, so the pin marks the address rather than a surviving room.

The negatives outlasted both men. They are held in the Library of Congress, catalogued under the names the Sketch Book restored.

📸 Cover: "M.B. Brady's new photographic gallery, corner of Broadway and Tenth Street, New York" — an engraving of visitors viewing photographs in the gallery, Library of Congress, public domain via Wikimedia Commons. Not a view of the 1862 exhibition itself.