Photo Gallery

PHOTO GALLERY

Photographs of Civil War soldiers are a subject of endless fascination for any student of the war. The Civil War was the first widely photographed American war, and the technology was fascinating to the country boys who made up units like the Fifteenth Kentucky. Many Civil War soldiers had their photographs taken in the days immediately after they received their uniforms and weapons, when they were camped near a major city; frozen for the camera, dressed in uniforms which would never be so clean again, the young men tried to look fierce, brandishing pistols or long bowie knives. Most officers self-consciously echoed Napoleon in their poses, hiding one hand inside their tunics.

The earliest form of photograph was the Daguerreotype, a polished copper plate coated with silver iodide. By early in the 1850s, the Daguerreotype had largely given way to the Ambrotype, a moist glass plate developed with potassium cyanide. The tintype was a cheap variation on the ambrotype produced on tin plate; many photographs of civil war soldiers are tintypes. A few years after the ambrotype was introduced came the carte de visite. CDVs were taken from a glass negative that produced a sheet of four prints. The prints were mounted on cardboard and given to friends and family; the name and city of the photographer is usually printed on the back. But all of these had one thing in common: exposures were, by modern standards, quite long. As a result, photographers used a heavy brace to keep the subject's head still. The need for long exposures is also the reason that no "action photos" of the war exist; photographs taken on the battlefield are overwhelmingly photos of the dead.

Relatively few photographs of the soldiers of the Fifteenth Kentucky have been discovered to date. As new photographs come to light, they will be posted here. Click the thumbnails to see the larger photo.