In 1839 , when picture taking shouldered its way onto the Earth stage with a visual splendor unlike anything preceding it , Abraham Lincoln , at thirty , was nurturing a young political career as a third - term legislator in the Illinois House of Representatives while building his newfangled police force practice in Springfield , Illinois . Lincoln undoubtedly read paper reports about the invention of picture taking , replete with awe - instigate description write by writers who fight to find words to draw how a photograph looked to a the great unwashed who had never ensure such a affair .
“ They are the most remarkable objects of curiosity and admiration , in the arts , that we ever lay eyes on , ” wrote the editor of The Knickerbocker in December 1839 after meet some of the first pic ( known as “ daguerreotype ” for their inventor , Frenchman Louis - Jacques - Mandé Daguerre ) on display in New York City . “ Their exquisite perfection almost transcends the bounds of sombre belief , ” inventor and painter Samuel F. B. Morse wrote .
The new invention was yet another shine achievement of civilization ’s progress - and another reason for antebellum Americans to marvel at how innovative was the time in which they lived . The steam engine was revolutionizing Department of Transportation , and the locomotive , also get laid as the iron cavalry , was run through the countryside , chug from one city to the next with remarkable speed and relief . In the 1830s , Morse himself had perfected his telegraphy , which fire Morse code messages across vast distance like flashes of lightning . And a newfangled car called a reaper harvested crops faster than an total bunch of worker , be they devoid homo or hard worker .
It was an age of philosophic enlightenment , too , and religious reaffirmation . Across the area , Americans rededicated themselves to the moral values of their Christian heritage , and so began to face at the inconvenient Sojourner Truth of slavery as a mar on democracy ’s lofty ideals . By the 1830s , the issue of unvoluntary servitude had been a topic of debate in North America for at least eighty year . The quality of the discussion sharpened , however , when a Massachusetts social reformer , William Lloyd Garrison , began to couch slavery in a religious context , insisting that own slaves was a hell against God . In 1831 , Garrison established a hebdomadal newspaper publisher , The Liberator , devote to the obliteration of thraldom , and , through it , helped plunge the abolitionist movement . The South , whose agricultural economic system was subordinate on slave Department of Labor , hold up Garrison as a criminal , and such rancor grew as class and then X go along .
As the slavery pot simmer on the back burner , an enterprising new daguerreian artist named Nicholas H. Shepherd arrived in the westerly frontier in 1845 to open one of the first daguerreotype galleries in Springfield , Illinois . Abraham Lincoln and his young married woman , Mary , were among his former customers , donning their o.k. clothes one day in 1846 before pose in front of the television camera , one after the other , each gaze into the lense with the same resolute countenance . In 1847 , Lincoln was off to Washington to attend his first and only term in Congress , where his causa was not slavery - not yet , anyway - but opposite to the Mexican War .
By March 1861 , when Abraham Lincoln became chairman , the country had divide itself aside over thrall , while the exposure had evolved into new forms that expanded its part in American acculturation . The old-hat daguerreotype had been rendered disused - like the film camera today - by loud , well-off - to - make pic . The Modern craze became report photograph pasted onto cards . The card photograph , or carte de visite , was created using a glass - scale negative , which was exposed and evolve , and then placed on a piece of light - sensible photographic newspaper publisher and bathed in sunlight . The exposure paper , after being developed , was trimmed and then pasted to a thin piece of visiting card stock . A single negative could be used to print four persona , or a hundred , or thousands when it came to images of Lincoln and other notables .
Even more sensational was the ikon be intimate as a stereograph , or stereo view , which was a photo see in 3 - D through a stereoscope , or stereo viewer - another 1830s innovation . “ The first effect of looking at a beneficial pic through the stereoscope is a surprise such as no painting ever produced , ” the litterateur Oliver Wendell Holmes publish in 1859 . “ The mind palpate its way into the very depths of the characterization . The scraggy branches of a Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree in the foreground run out at us as if they would scratch our eye out . ” Before the rise of the stereo view , photography was largely limited to the creation of photographic keepsakes of family and friends . With the advent of mass - marketed stereo opinion in the belated 1850s , and with Holmes ’s invention of a simple , handheld stereoscope , picture taking now could also allow for a photographic showing experience . You could take a 3 - D tour of the world while sitting in the living room of your own place . Before motion picture and television , the stereo view was the closest thing to telecasting that nineteenth - century Americans had . It was the first mass - marketed manakin of ocular home entertainment , and the conflict provide boundless unexampled
stereographic opportunities .
Thus , on the eventide of the Civil War , Americans were presented with a novel means to see war . The tall bluff of the Hudson River Valley and the majestic Niagara Falls were hex , but people starve for warfare news back then just as they guttle news today , and the stereophonic vista was a spectacular Modern visual way to bring actual panorama from the battlefields and the seats of power into American homes . With the rise of mass - market photographs , the Lincoln presidency would become the first presidency that was well documented by the tv camera , most often by the matching - lens system camera of the stereo photographer . The Washington that Lincoln knew - the White House , the bare Capitol , the gravid public building , the fort that ringed the metropolis - was documented with the depth - fill colour that only a 3 - D photo can provide . Those same stereo camera also recorded the war ’s battlefields , sometimes still fresh with the dead who fall there , the generals who won and lost those battles , and the men who did the fighting , creating a ocular legacy that still captivates and moves us today , almost 150 years later .
Waist Deep in Cotton : Gullah Women of Mt. Pleasant , South Carolina , organise sea island cotton plant for the gin James Mill of the Alex . Knox Plantation near Charleston in the ca . 1864 photograph by George N. Bernard . ( Robin Stanford Collection ) .
Lone Grave : The lone grave of a Union soldier sits under a scraggly tree on the Antietam battlefield . ( Library of Congress ) .
Top – With Firm Resolve : Lincoln Strikes a determined pose for the camera of government photographer Lewis Walker in 1863 ( Courtesy of the Center for Civil War Photography )
Bob Zeller is a author , diary keeper , and authority on Civil War picture taking who has published 10 book , including The Civil War in deepness . He is atomic number 27 - beginner and president of the nonprofit Center for Civil War Photography . John J. Richter , a leading private collector of Civil War and Lincoln - related stereophonic picture , is director of imaging and a member of the panel of directors of the Center for Civil War Photography .
Harold Holzer is co - chair of the United States Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission and fourth-year vice president for external function at the Metropolitan Museum of Art .
Gizmodo 3D ! We ’re excited about the electric potential of amusement in Three Ds , so this hebdomad , we ’re looking at everything good , big and ludicrous about the current state of 3D.
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