Untitled [portrait of an unidentified Civil War soldier] 1858 - 1869

This portrait of an unidentified Civil War soldier was made by Jeremiah Gurney, a pioneering photographer in the mid-19th century. It’s a small object, a testament to the burgeoning industry of photographic portraiture at the time. Gurney used the wet collodion process, a technique that democratized image-making. A glass plate was coated with chemicals, exposed in the camera while still wet, and then developed immediately. This had to be done quickly, turning photography into a kind of performance. The resulting image, a so-called ‘tintype’ or ‘ferrotype,’ is a direct positive, meaning there is no negative. Each one is unique. The speed and relative affordability of the process meant that soldiers, like the one in this portrait, could have their likeness taken before heading off to war. The very materiality of the image, its fragility and intimate scale, speaks to the human desire for remembrance and the poignant ephemerality of life.