I visited the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens while its current exhibition, “A Strange and Fearful Interest: Death, Mourning, and Memory in the American Civil War,” was being installed. I’d be tempted to call the Huntington a “peculiar institution,” had that phrase not already been coined as a euphemism for slavery in the pre-Civil War era. Let’s just say that, at least in Los Angeles, the Huntington is a unique institution. It has only around half the visitors each year that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art or the Getty does, and—the unique aspect—the Huntington seems content with that. It is an unapologetically elitist institution whose exhibitions are, at their best, not blockbusters but intelligent and lucid explorations of difficult subjects. “A Strange and Fearful Interest,” mounted from the Huntington collection by the Library’s curator of photography, Jennifer Watts, is a prime example.

The title is a quotation from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., made after an 1862 trip to Maryland to find his son, who had been shot through the neck in the Battle of Antietam. In a single day, the combined casualties were almost 23,000 men, with 3,500 killed outright. It wasn’t uncommon for family members to rush to battlegrounds lest their men lie untended in field hospitals or their corpses lay putrefying where they fell. Oliver, Jr. had suffered a chest wound in 1861 at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff and would be shot in the foot at Chancellorsville in 1863; after recuperating at home, he returned to his regiment all three times.

The exhibition title is drawn from Oliver, Sr.’s 1863 observation that “photography is extending itself to embrace subjects of strange and sometimes of fearful interest,” which is another period euphemism, this one inspired by an 1862 exhibition held at Mathew Brady’s New York gallery. Before civilians like Holmes, Sr. arrived, Brady staff photographer Alexander Gardner was at Antietam. Photography wasn’t nimble enough to compete with the sketch artists sent by Frank Leslie’s Illustrated and other publications to draw while the battles raged. The slow exposures and the bulky equipment that Gardner and his team had to deploy limited them to the battle’s aftermath, which included not only nature blown to splinters but the dead where they fell. Because unmoving, the corpses were a subject as irresistible as it was horrific.

And these pictures of the dead were included in Brady’s exhibition. The Huntington exhibition has a separate room, its walls a deep purple-black, devoted to Antietam photographs that Brady displayed. Whereas the public knew published sketches of battles were impressionistic fictions, these photographs were unassuageable facts. The New York Times reported that it was almost as if Brady had “brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets”; repulsive as they are, the newspaper admitted, the pictures have “a terrible fascination,” making it hard to turn away. Such photographs sold briskly throughout the war, as the Huntington acknowledges by displaying album pages of them.

Alexander Gardener, Completely Silenced! Dead Confederate Artillery Men, As they lay around their battery after the Battle of Antietam, September 1862

More than any other single revelation, these photographs contradicted the dreams of glory with which the war had begun, the vision of men leading a cavalry charge with swords drawn. The Civil War was the first in which the slaughter had become mechanized. At Gettysburg the year after Antietam, the casualties more than doubled to 53,000, in three days. North and South alike had thought the war would be concluded within months rather than the years for which it dragged on, ultimately taking a toll, between the carnage and the disease, of more Americans than all other wars from the Revolution through the Korean War combined.

The Huntington exhibition abounds in all the media by which images were distributed during the war, from a crude wanted poster for the Lincoln Conspirators to a “line and stipple artist’s proof” of a John Batchelder print after an Alonzo Chappell painting, from published sketches of Antietam battlefields copied from photographs to a collage of printed, handwritten and photographic material exposing the Confederate brutalities inflicted on prisoners of war at Andersonville. The Bowie knife with which assassin Lewis Powell attacked Secretary of State William Seward is also on display. But in both their numbers and their effect, it is the photographs that predominate.

Lithographs of A Soldier’s Grave or Lincoln’s assassination illustrate the artistic liberties taken in that medium; the grave scene is greeting-card maudlin, the assassination an image showing Lincoln shot in the wrong side of his head as Booth performs a plié leaping onto the stage. Photography, on the other hand, contained the dialectically opposed realities of the war. Besides being the public acknowledgement of the shocking human toll the war took, photography provided the private mementos that soldiers and their families cherished–the pictures of themselves that men left behind or of their wives and children that they carried into battle tucked inside their uniforms. Each of these functions, both as concrete documentation of mass destruction and a reminder of personal sentiments, reinforced the other. Each threw into relief the other side of the contradiction—the death grip—in which the entire nation was locked.

Unidentified tintypist, Portrait of Mrs. Frederick (Marie) Ockershauser, c. 1861, Images courtesy of Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

The exhibition is rich in examples of the second type of photograph as well as the first. An unknown drummer boy in an 1863 daguerreotype stands behind his mother with his hand on her shoulder. His is a standard pose, but one customarily assumed by a husband with his wife, suggesting that this boy must now be the man in his family. Or consider Frederick Ockerhauser’s tintype of his wife. She had embroidered the leather slipcase that protected the portrait when he took it with him to the war, but only the cased tintype came back home again.

As either a document or a memento, a photograph is a stoical object. As if to countermand his father’s characterization of photographs of war as “strange and fearful,” Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. characterized the experience of war as “horrible and dull.” The latter term suggests the slogging repetitiousness of campaigning. Like photography, language was affected by the war. American prose was transformed forever, as Gary Wills has pointed out, by a three-minute speech Lincoln gave at Gettysburg. But in the short term, I wonder whether the war didn’t degrade language as well—whether speech itself didn’t become a kind of mechanical device, one more like a gun than a camera.

The coup de grace delivered to the Confederacy came from repeating rifles issued to Union troops, an innovation that increased exponentially the murderousness of combat. It’s odd how pointlessly repetitious some last words noted in the exhibition were, too. When Booth was caught and shot by the soldiers dispatched to hunt him down, his last words were, “Useless, useless”; and when his accomplice Powell was caught, he screamed, “I’m mad! I’m mad!” Then there’s the refrain to which Walt Whitman was driven when he tried to sum up the war in 1865: “the dead, the dead, the dead, the dead” was all he could say. The war was so horrible that it left people gibbering, or speechless.  Only photographs could tell the horror of it all without being injured by the telling itself.

Just as the ubiquity of pornography in our own age has numbed our ability to respond to the nude figure in art, female or male, so has tabloid sensationalism deadened our response to death itself after seeing in the news media bodies ranging from victims of automobile accidents to the victims of genocide. The value of the Huntington’s exhibition is to remind us of a time when photography of a certain kind was new and the shock of such images had not yet worn off. The exhibition re-contextualizes for us not just the photographs, but shared emotions they evoked for which we no longer have a reference or even, perhaps, a capacity.