Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner was born #OTD in 1821. Gardner began his career working for Matthew Brady and founded his own studio in May 1863. He was the first person to photograph the unburied bodies of dead soldiers on an American battlefield. Alexander Gardner was born in Paisley, Renfrewshire, Scotland. He was apprenticed as a jeweler at the age of 14 and became the owner/editor of the Glasgow Sentinel in 1851. He immigrated to America in 1856 with the hopes of joining a socialist cooperative community in Iowa.
Gardner began working with famed photographer Matthew Brady in 1856 and was placed in charge of Brady’s Washington DC studio in 1858. He served as a staff photographer for the Army of the Potomac under General McClellan. Gardner’s photographs of fallen soldiers at the Battle of Antietam were the first of their kind in American history and showed the horrors of combat on the home front. These were the first photographs of unburied dead soldiers on an American battlefield.
By the winter of 1862 Gardner’s working relationship with Brady ended. Gardner spent that winter with the Union Army under the command of Ambrose Burnside and was present at the Battle of Fredericksburg. He opened his own studio in Washington in May of 1863.
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