A house divided against itself cannot stand.
I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. – Abraham Lincoln, 1858
The University of Saint Joseph Art Museum in West Hartford, Connecticut announced a new exhibition, A House Divided: Photography and the Civil War, on view through May 10. This exhibition, which features over 100 photographs drawn from the private collection of Michael Mattis and Judy Hochberg and organized by www.art2art.com, documents numerous important aspects of the American Civil War, as seen through the lens of the most gifted artist-photographers of 19th century America. The objects comprise a cornucopia of photographic processes and formats: salt and albumen prints (several of them delicately overpainted), daguerreotypes (photos on silver-plated copper plates), ambrotypes (photos on glass), tintypes (photos on base metal), opalotypes (photos on milk glass), cartes-de-visite, and stereographs.
At a time when America often appears to be coming apart at the seams, it is timely and sobering to revisit its bloodiest conflict, in which 620,000 young men lost their lives fighting brother against brother. While the Civil War was not the first conflict recorded by the camera, it was by far the most extensive photographic effort to date, with some 300 itinerant photographers covering every theater of war, and every portrait studio memorializing the new recruits in their fresh uniforms. Photography was only 22 years old when the first shots were fired on Fort Sumter, but photomechanical advances already made it possible to reproduce these images in the nation’s newspapers and magazines. In this respect modern photojournalism was born in the Civil War.
A House Divided : Photography and the Civil War
March 21 – May 10, 2025
University of Saint Joseph Art Museum
1678 Asylum Ave.
West Hartford, CT 06117
https://www.usj.edu/about/arts/art-museum/
