Alexander Gardner, born in Paisley, Scotland, in 1821, trained for seven years as a jeweler, edited the Glasgow Sentinel to fund a cooperative commune in Iowa inspired by Robert Owen, and then fell for photography after seeing Mathew Brady’s work at London’s Great Exhibition of 1851. Arriving in America in 1856 to find the commune ravaged by tuberculosis, he joined Brady, mastered large imperial prints, and ran Brady’s Washington gallery as Brady’s eyesight failed.

Through Allan Pinkerton, Gardner became a photographer with McClellan’s army and used the wet plate collodion process to photograph the dead at Antietam, images that shocked New Yorkers. Angered by Brady’s practice of stamping his own name on employees’ work, Gardner opened his own studio in 1863, photographed Lincoln seven times, documented the execution of the assassination conspirators, and published his two volume Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War in 1866, crediting every photographer. In 1975, historian William Frassanito showed that Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter was staged by dragging a body about 40 yards into Devil’s Den.

• Wet plate photographers had roughly 10 to 15 minutes to coat, expose, and develop each glass plate in a mobile darkroom wagon.
• Families used magnifying glasses on the Antietam prints to identify dead relatives.
• A famous cracked plate portrait of Lincoln, long called the last photo before his death, was actually taken in February 1865.
• The Sketch Book credited photographers including Timothy O’Sullivan and James Gibson but sold poorly in a grieving nation.
• Gardner left photography by 1871, helped found an insurance company, and hundreds of his lost negatives were found in 1893.