Books of photographs occupy a strange position in the average American's house. Many of them are marketed as "coffee table" books; their very existence a testament to the taste, the intellect, and the personality of the owner of said coffee table. LENS OF WAR (University of Georgia) is most definitely not a coffee table book, although perhaps it should be, as the photographs and the commentaries upon them would be certain to provoke discussions.
As someone who was not born in the United States, but went through the American educational system from kindergarten to graduate school, I'm aware of the unique position that the Civil War occupies in the popular imagination. Photography books are not cheap to produce, but University of Georgia press is probably not wrong in banking on this collection making a profit for its publishers. Its drop date of April 15, 2015 is conspicuous, being the sesquicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's death from an assassin's bullet the night before.
The premise behind the book seems simple enough. The book's editors--J. Mathew Gallman and Gary W. Gallagher--contacted a number of Civil War historians and asked them to each pick a favorite photograph from the war, along with an essay that explained the significance of the photo.
Most of the writers respond with remarkable candor. For those who think that all historians engage in parching prose best used as a sleeping pill, prepare to be surprised. Writers use colorful language in presenting these black-and-white images. And the choice of photograph reveals as much about the historian as his or her biography in the back of the book.
The book opens with a series of portraits of some of the "great men" of the war: Lincoln, Lee, Grant, Stonewall Jackson, and Sherman. On at least two of the occasions, historians proclaim that it was the portrait of the great man that caused them, at a young age, to "fall in love" with the Civil War, statements that I find troubling. While accepting that perhaps they are referring to their child selves who saw in the romanticism of the portraits the same window into an adventurous time that others experienced looking at portraits of the Tudors--Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, in particular. I admit to reading every book that I could lay hands on about the Tudor court between 1509 and 1603; the Holbein portraits creating larger than life images sure to capture the attention of an eight-year old girl.
But falling in love with a war strikes me as insensitive, given that portraits of great men were not far removed from the famous battleground images of the war's dead. It is not surprising, therefore, that the historians who chose portraits of great men possessed different attitudes toward the war than those who chose some of the more graphic images of suffering, deprivation, and destruction that followed in the remaining sections.
If you pay attention to the stories told by the historians, one gains a view into where each historian sits in the range of theories of the war. Whether identifying themselves as members of the "Lost Cause" school of thought to the newer theories of the "Destructive War," one finds a number of occasions where professors, many of them affiliated with southern colleges, painting the Union armies as punishing and blood thirsty. In an example of sloppy scholarship, Joan Waugh, writing about U.S. Grant says, "without attribution," "The battles of the six-week Overland Campaign, where Grant's and Lee's armies fought to bloody stalemate across Virginia's countryside, gave rise to the nickname of "butcher," for the general-in-chief whose main strategy seemed to be throwing bodies at the enemy."
LENS OF WAR is a great book to add to any Civil War student's collection. Photographs are not objective documents that simply record what is there. In some cases, what is there was stage-managed by the photographer who sought to drive home a point with his newspaper audiences. In some cases, the analysis of the photographs turns the lens upon the historian as much as the war itself.
As we approach the 150th anniversary of the official end of the Civil War, LENS OF WAR does a great job of illustrating William Faulkner's observation of history itself. "The past is never dead," he wrote, in REQUIEM FOR A NUN "It's not even past."
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