Whittled wooden spoons, crude baking dishes, artillery shells, and soup bones form a strange, altar-like arrangement. Collected by Clara Barton from the notorious Confederate prison camp immediately after the American Civil War, these objects were then photographed by Mathew Brady鈥檚 studio. Widely circulated at the time, Relics of Andersonville Prison (1866) allows for a transformation by which pain is detached from the original site鈥攖he human body鈥攁nd signified by inanimate things that retain a physical link to the past. This talk asks how the photograph itself might function as a relic, what the material and ontological significance of such a characterization could be, and how the relic as object and as photographic image provided a historically-specific means to contend with the pressing questions of finding, naming, and burying the dead of the Civil War.
Jennifer Raab is Associate Professor in the History of Art at Yale University. She specialises in American art and visual culture with particular interests in the history of photography, aesthetic theory, the history of science, and the relationship between literary and visual representation.听Her first book,听Frederic Church: The Art and Science of Detail听(Yale University Press, 2015), examines the changing visual, cultural, and historical meaning of detail in nineteenth-century America. Her current book project,听Relics of War听(under contract with Princeton University Press), considers how the work of photographing warfare鈥攁nd specifically violence to the body鈥攕haped post-Civil War photography in the United States.