In this photographic print by Timothy O’Sullivan, decomposing corpses litter the ground after the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1-3, 1863). Innumerable amounts of the dead blanket the earth, stretching far beyond the misty horizon line. The clarity of the bodies in the foreground, reveal the stages of decomposition, and the violent nature of their deaths. The soldiers faces are swollen, mouths gone slack, and eyes upturned towards the sky as if praying to God. Their bodies are tangled like weeds, shoes and other valuables long pillaged. A single horse is seen in the background, domineering over the corpses on the field, as if one of the horsemen of the apocalypse. Three lone, shadowy figures also stand above the dead soldiers presumably deciding how to bury the insurmountable amount of fallen soldiers. …show more content…
Beginning in the early morning of July 1, 1863, the battle labored on until July 3. Although the Union decisively won, both sides were decimated with the battle, losing more than twenty thousand lives on both sides. When the dust cleared, photographers, such as Timothy O’Sullivan, walked onto the battlefield to preserve the devastating moment, and to remind people of the scope and scale of war, and the humanity of the fallen soldiers. Timothy O’Sullivan (1840-1882) initially began as an apprentice under Mathew Brady, but left Brady to photograph the Civil War with Alexander Gardner’s team of photographers. Publishing, Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the War (1866), Alexander Gardner included more than forty of O’Sullivan’s photographs. Interested in the macabre, and dark uncensored realities of war, the team of photographers entered onto the ghostly battlefield on July 5,