‘At work with the Baillie’: reconfiguring assistantship and creative authorship in the Scots migrant community around Alexander Gardner.

Description

This paper presents new primary research into the cadre of photographers who worked around Alexander Gardner during the later years of the American Civil War. For decades, Paisley-born Gardner has been justifiably lauded as one of the leading figures in photography of the war, even though so much of his gallery’s output was historically credited to his one-time employer Mathew B. Brady. (Meredith 1946; Horan 1955; Szarkowski 1966) It is ironic, therefore, that even as Gardner’s significance has been better understood, those who worked with him and through his gallery have been described in canonical works as assistants, operators, and ‘Gardner employees’, rather than photographers or artists (see for example Frassanito 1975 and 1983; Parr and Badger 2004; Waugh 2015). Furthermore, in modern scholarship Gardner continues to be jointly or solely credited for their images even where evidence establishes their authorship. (Van Steenwyk 1997; Williams 2003; Zeller 2005; Lee 2007; Schantz 2008; Snyder 2014; Smith 2020)

This cadre was brought together mostly through Gardner’s association with the Scots expatriate community in Maryland and the District of Columbia. Some came via the local St Andrews Society, whilst others were Gardner’s family or old Paisley connections. Although they are occasionally referred to in primary sources as assistants, it is also clear from records that many self-identified as photographers and artists, and it is undoubtedly the case that they were personally responsible for some of the most enduring images of the war. The paper focuses on previously under-researched members, such as John Reekie and James F. Gibson, and explores the formation of this group by approaching them as citizen photographers analogous to the citizen soldier: trained to a task at hand that had great import, but who ultimately returned to ‘civilian’ life after the war. The paper will ask whether such an identity can account for the continuing failure of scholarship to engage with them as photographers in their own right.

Period	18 Jun 2024
Event title	Photography History Research Centre Annual Conference
Event type	Conference
Location	Leicester, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International