Ruins of Petersburg and Richard Raidroad Bridge 1864

Editor: Here we have Alexander Gardner’s “Ruins of Petersburg and Richard Railroad Bridge,” taken in 1864. It's a gelatin silver print, and its desolate landscape feels overwhelmingly somber. The ruined bridge and crumbling architecture definitely evoke a sense of loss. What do you see when you look at this photograph? Curator: What do *I* see? A graveyard of ambition, perhaps. Gardner, bless his soul, captured not just rubble and ruin but the echo of lives disrupted, futures incinerated. Look at those stark verticals—the bridge supports, the chimney standing defiant, almost mocking the sky. They are like lonely sentinels, silent witnesses. Don't you think that this is a very palpable silence? Editor: It is heavy. The composition makes the ruins loom, a little claustrophobic actually. Was Gardner trying to make a statement about the futility of war? Curator: Ah, the "futility of war"—the critic's easy trope. Perhaps. Or perhaps, and I rather prefer this, he was reminding us, whispering, yelling perhaps that even from ruin springs a type of brutal beauty. There’s a stillness in these images, and the technical execution and composition certainly elevates the images to the status of ‘art’, far more impactful than the landscape paintings that preceded it. There's an element of visual poetry amid all the death. Editor: So, beyond the immediate devastation, it's also about resilience? Curator: Precisely. Think of it not as an end, but a haunting overture to something new. Destruction is often an instrument of creation as well. Now I see that silence I talked about. Do you hear it now? Editor: I think I do. The photo becomes less about absence, and more about anticipation… of the city rebuilding perhaps. This gives a new understanding of 19th Century photography in my mind!