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Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter
Alexander Gardner Courtesy Library of Congress
Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, July 5, 1983
May 14, 2009 | 12:00 a.m. CST
Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner took Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter and manipulated the image, which fooled Americans for almost a century. The subterfuge at hand involves the artificial construction of a tableau photograph by moving and arranging a rifle and dead body from its original place.
“The idea of this photograph being staged is not necessarily the smoking gun,” says Joe Johnson, MU assistant professor of photography. “People tend to think that the digital revolution has something to do with the way photographs lie.”
Johnson explains that Gardner’s manipulation of the photograph was likely done to create a more accurate truth about the living conditions of soldiers during the Civil War.
Speaking to the true value of photography, Johnson adds: “It’s a testament to how reliable photographic description can be but also to how absolutely unreliable photographic description is.”
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