Andrew Joseph Russell:Laborers at Quartermaster's Wharf, Alexandria, Virginia, 1863-65, albumen silver print from glass negative, 5 3/16 by 7 15/16 inches. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art.
It’s your last chance to spend the afternoon with the Met’s thoroughly engrossing and beautifully installed show (some of the walls are lined with heavy canvas in a subtle nod to army tents) “Photography and the American Civil War.” When war broke out, the medium was only 20 years old, but a cadre of fearless photographers-Mathew Brady, Timothy O’Sullivan and Alexander Gardner, among many more obscure but equally ambitious men-set up mobile photography studios and set out to document the camps, battlefields and hospitals of the Civil War. Particularly haunting are surgeon/photographer Reed Brockway Bontecou’s images of gruesomely wounded soldiers.