George N Barnard
George N. Barnard ( December 23, 1819 in Coventry , Connecticut ; † February 4, 1902 in Cedarvale , New York ) was an American photographer who was best known for his images of the American Civil War .
early years
George Norman Barnard was born in Coventry on 23 December 1819 to Norman and Grace Badger Barnard. After his father's death in 1826, Barnard moved his family to New York City . He later lived with his sister in Gallatin , Tennessee , but returned to New York in 1842 and a year later married his wife Sarah Jane Hodges , with whom he had two children, one of whom died in infancy. In 1845 Barnard worked as a hotelier in Oswego before opening his own daguerreotype studio a year later . Since he had no training with a photographer, it remains unclear where he acquired his photographic knowledge.
career as a photographer
His July 5, 1853 pictures of the Oswego flour mill fire are now considered the first news photos, making Barnard one of the founders of photojournalism . In the same year he opened a studio in Syracuse , where in addition to the daguerreotype he soon also used processes such as ambrotype and ferrotype . After selling this studio in 1857, he specialized in cartography and compiled a gazetteer of the state of New York. Two years later he resumed work as a photographer, working for a while for Edward Anthony, then becoming an assistant to famed photographer Mathew B. Brady in New York City alongside Timothy H. O'Sullivan , Alexander Gardner and others . As the demand for portraits, especially of soldiers, increased sharply with the looming Civil War, Barnard von Brady was also used for this.
After the war broke out, Barnard was then in many important locations in Virginia , such as Manassas , Harpers Ferry or Yorktown on site to photograph the events. In 1863 he was hired by the Army of the Cumberland to make copies of maps and document the topography of the landscape in Nashville , Tennessee . A year later he accompanied General William T. Sherman and produced pictures of the Atlanta campaign and the subsequent march to sea to Savannah . The pictures from Columbia and Charleston , South Carolina marked the conclusion of his war photography . In 1866 he published 61 of these photographs, which are among the most famous of Barnard's today, in his book Photographic Views of the Sherman Campaign .
After returning to work in Syracuse and Charleston after the war, Barnard moved to Chicago , where his studio was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1871 . Barnard also captured this in photographs. He then settled back in Charleston between 1873 and 1880. However, he then moved to Henrietta , New York, where he married his second wife, Emma Chapin Gilbert , in 1881. He found employment with the Eastman Kodak Company of Rochester , for which he did demonstrations of the novel gelatin dry plate process . But the next few years were again characterized by wandering, and so the family first moved to Painesville , Ohio , then to Gadsden , Alabama , before moving to a farm in Cedarvale, New York in 1893. Here Barnard spent his twilight years and still made money doing portraiture.
He died on February 4, 1902 and was buried in a cemetery near Syracuse.
In 2013 his photographs were part of the exhibition Photography and the American Civil War at the Metropolitan Museum of Art .
literature
- Keith F Davis: George N Barnard. Photographer of Sherman's Campaign . University of New Mexico Press, 1990, ISBN 978-0875296289 .
web links
- George N Barnard. In: Luminous-Lint. (English).
- George N Barnard: Photographic Views of the Sherman Campaign. Wynkoop & Hallenbeck, 1866 (English).
- Elizabeth Manton: Photos from the collection of George N Barnard. In www.cnyhistory.org. Onondaga Historical Association Museum & Research Center, August 7, 2003, archived from the original on October 8, 2006 .
- Works by George N. Barnard in the Panoramic Photographs collection at the Library of Congress
itemizations
- ↑ Biography: George N. Barnard (1819-1902). Library of Congress, accessed 4 February 2022 (English).
- ↑ Alison Eldridge: George N Barnard. American photographer. Britannica, January 31, 2022, retrieved February 4, 2022 (English).
- ↑ Megan Kate Nelson: Urban Destruction during the Civil War. Oxford Research Encyclopedias, June 9, 2016, accessed February 4, 2022 .
- ↑ Vince Aletti: Battle Seen. In: The New Yorker. 22 April 2013, accessed 4 February 2022 (English).
personal data | |
---|---|
SURNAME | Barnard, George N. |
BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American photographer |
BIRTH DATE | December 23, 1819 |
PLACE OF BIRTH | Coventry (Connecticut) |
DATE OF DEATH | February 4, 1902 |
PLACE OF DEATH | Cedarvale , New York |