Episode 208: In the Gallery

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This is the Memory Palace.

I'm Nate DeMayo.

A postcard from Manhattan, October 1862.

They lined up for hours in Broadway, as the rest of the city hustled past, as the shadows stretched up the brick wall in the shortening day, in the deepening bite of autumn.

And then their turn would come to wait some more in the warmth of the stairwell, watching people come down the stairs from the second-floor gallery, who looked different than they had on the way up.

The sign outside told them what to expect, though it couldn't prepare them.

The dead of Antietam.

20 images taken on the battlefield barely a month before.

Matthew Brady, who owned the gallery gallery up the stairs, had sent a team of photographers at great expense to document the Civil War.

In its earliest days, he took the photos himself, barely avoided capture at Bull Run, but he wasn't at Antietam.

A vision problem that had dogged him most of his life had been getting progressively worse.

A cruel fate for a photographer, but it was a time of cruel fates.

Brady's name was on the gallery and would appear in the papers as reviewers wrestled with what they saw upstairs.

But a man named Alexander Gardner took the pictures.

He was a Scotsman with a beard fit for the Sistine ceiling, who'd come to America with a dream of starting a socialist colony on the frontier but found his calling in the Washington, D.C.

branch of Brady's studio.

He got good at portraits.

And on the eve of the war, he would pose the young men who lined up on Pennsylvania Avenue to get their pictures taken so people who loved them would have something of them to hold on to while they were gone.

Or if it turned out, they always would be.

Gardner arrived in Antietam two days after the Confederate retreat.

It was two years into the war and he had seen battles before.

He had led teams of fellow Brady employees as they trailed the Northern Army, hauling supplies and volatile chemicals, a tent they tricked out to serve as a darkroom.

He had taken photos of field hospitals and generals.

the president.

But he had never been on a battlefield before the bodies had been cleared.

And so he hauled his camera out across Antietam

to take pictures of some of the thousands of soldiers, now that they were bodies, laying in grass, bent behind stone walls and tree trunks that failed to save them.

He thought people needed to see.

They saw them upstairs, the first photographs of dead American soldiers in the field that anyone had ever taken.

We don't know how many people came to see the dead of Antietam when Gardner's pictures went on display in Brady's studio.

Maybe thousands.

Whatever constituted the crowds and the cues and the constant stream of people up and down the stairs as were described in the papers.

You picture them.

The people, they're seeing.

Picture them bent over, these women and men.

See them leaning over a long table, bringing their faces all the way down, or standing by waiting their turn to do the same.

These photos were stereoscopic, taken in 3D, two lenses separated a few inches apart, just a bit wider than people's eyes.

Took two separate photographs.

When you looked at them through a special viewer, the two images would merge, mimic the way that most of our brains perceive depth and see a single field of vision despite having two eyes.

You may have done this before with a stereoscope from the 19th century or maybe just in a view master.

And you might have, maybe even probably, seen some of these specific images from Antietam, though almost certainly in two dimensions.

Confederate soldiers in a ditch or by a fence where they fell.

They're black and white, of course, the details are hard to make out.

There are a few faces that you can really read.

You may be able to picture them now, which you can't understand.

We can't really.

But those people bent over those tables looking through those lenses, seeing the dead of Antietam, really saw.

And I mean this literally to a point that even if you've seen 19th century stereo photographs with a 19th century stereoscope, you've probably never seen just how real the depth is.

When the photos are pristine, the lenses are new and properly positioned.

You can't do that anymore.

The pictures are more than 100 years old.

But they were once transporting in a way that is kind of lost to us now.

And those soldiers in the ditch, by a road receding into the distance, when you can feel that distance, when the dead stretch back into it in a chaotic line, further than seems possible.

When two dead men lay intertwined in three dimensions, you can't help but know that those men were real.

You can somehow feel how the weight of one man presses upon the other, how his outstretched arm tamps down the grass.

As the people in the gallery, as they stood there, bent over a long table, and then rose.

Maybe shook their heads, maybe held back tears, maybe were unreadable.

just moving from one photo to the next.

From the dead at Dunker Church or along Hagerstown Road, or to a man barely that, a teenager alone in a field on his back in sunshine he cannot feel, the people would bend over, place their faces into that viewer, and then they were in this uncanny black and white world, between Manhattan and Antietam, between here and there, between alive and not, between unreal and more real than some of them could handle.

And they would stand up back in that world of color and living things and walk down the stairs different than they had been when they walked up.

With that space and that moment that they spent with those men in those fields within them somehow.

And they walked off and went about their day.

Went back to work, to the butcher shop to figure out dinner, to help their sister with her kids.

Maybe haunted by the dead of Antietam.

Or not.

Maybe wondering why they weren't haunted.

Should they be?

What do we do with the dead in a picture?

On the paper?

As we hustle past.

This episode of The Memory Palace was written and produced by me, Nate DeMayo, in September of 2023.

The show gets research assistance from Eliza McGraw.

It is a proud member of Radiotopia, a network of independent podcasts individually owned and operated with the help and support of PRX, a public media company.

I was just in New York last week,

not far from Brady's studio, in what has traditionally been an annual retreat with the other Radiotopia shows and folks who work in the business side and in marketing and ad sales and fundraising.

But post-pandemic, this was the first in a long time that I was able to go to.

And it was a remarkable thing to be in a room again with old friends and colleagues and the new people who have joined the network in this last stretch and I came away as I always do but particularly this time so grateful to be a part of this remarkable network that values all the things that I value as an artist and as a professional in a creative field independence

collaboration led by a strong moral compass a spirit of community

This thing that we've kind of created together it is this place where we each get to try and make the best show that we can make on our own terms and then try to make it work and be sustainable and it's amazing to look around

you know this room and be with these people who are on the same mission in their own ways it was wonderful if you ever want to support that that independent spirit in a time of mass consolidation and corporatization and commodification and least common denominator nonsense

You can always support what I do and what my colleagues here at Radiotopia do by going to radiotopia.fm slash donate.

You can follow me on Facebook and Twitter.

On Twitter at least for the time being at the Memory Palace.

Maybe I will join Blue Sky.

Maybe someone will send me an invite because I have not thought to or reached out and said, hey, I'll have one for people who've offered.

I've not bothered.

And maybe I will.

I don't know.

I do know that I am now squarely on Instagram now,

and you can get updates on the show there.

And I am the Memory Palace Podcast on Instagram, the Memory Palace Podcast.

You are always welcome to send me an email to nate at the Memorypalas.org.

I'll talk to you soon.

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from PRX.