There were more than 5,000 active photographers in the United States during the Civil War. That helps explain the wealth of wartime photographs, ranging from young privates in smart new uniforms to families in camp, to the devastation left in the armies’ wake, as well as numerous images of presidents and generals. “The Center for Civil War Photography— History in Focus” (CCWP) website is dedicated to explaining the art of Civil War photography, educating the public about its role in the war, and preserving digital copies of millions of wartime images.
In 1999 Bob Zeller, Rob Gibson and Al Benson founded CCWP, a nonprofit organization that has had an increasingly prominent presence on the Internet since the early 2000s. You may already know about CCWP through Rob Gibson’s Photographic Gallery in Gettysburg, where visitors can watch Gibson capture and process images just as photographers did in the 1860s.
The site is not merely a collection of images, like those available through the Library of Congress or the National Archives. Instead, CCWP educates visitors by presenting its collections in seminars and books, and digitizing and preserving as many images as possible. The site provides a concise introduction to the various types of 19th-century photographs, including ambrotypes, tintypes and cartes-de-visite. Visitors will enjoy CCWP’s 3-D Anaglyph Photographs Exhibit, providing they have the software or the glasses to view them properly. There are also several essays on the stories behind some of the conflict’s most famous images.
My only complaint: I wish brief descriptions accompanied the scrolling images that grace each page. There are so many fantastic photographs of camp life and battle-wrought devastation that the images clearly cry out for some contextual information.
Originally published in the June 2012 issue of Civil War Times. To subscribe, click here.
