A reader writes:
There were other, equally fascinating “phantom photographs” from the Civil War. During the war, Matthew Brady and other photographers practiced their relatively new art on the battlefield, “on location” for the first time instead of in a studio, photographing soldiers, sometimes wounded or dead, and the destruction of war. After the war, there was no market for these pictures in a nation saddened and disgusted by the carnage. The negatives were on glass plates which were then sold to make greenhouses – and over the next century, hundreds of images of that titanic struggle faded to ghostliness in backyard gardens. One can only hope the spirits of the dead witnessed the eternal renewal of nature and perhaps found a measure of peace.
In Ken Burns’ telling, the greenhouse glass was later re–recycled to make face plates for gas masks during World War I. His takeaway:
What I am trying to say in all of this is that there is a profound connection between remembering and freedom and human attachment. And that’s what history is to me. And forgetting is the opposite of all that: a kind of slavery, the worst kind of human detachment.
(Photo: Mathew Brady’s Civil War-era Soldiers in Front of “The Junction,” Tent)
The Dish 