War Week

Natalie M. Houston's article is mainly about the Crimean War, there are some simularities in both the Civil War and Crimean War. To place these wars into some context, this is the first time in history that people, I mean civilians, non-military types, have been able to see soldiers out in the open field. Most people would not have the stomach to see just what battle is all about, so they (the photographers) would take pictures in the forms of staged shots. They didn't have the materials in which to take pictures of the action and movement, they would just blur. As Jennifer Green Lewis notes, "The pictures are, without execption, invested with a sense of physical well-being and, indeed, order that belies the suffering and destruction of this (or any) war". This statement is really at the core of the pictures. However, the pictures of the Civil War do in fact show that war is and evil place to be in, and in some instances show that soldiers do die in war as some of the images show, now how many of those images finally made it to the paper or magizine I cannot be sure but it would more than what the reader in England would see. TheVictorian reader in England wanted there pictures to be warm and fussy, they didnt want to see the face of war they just wanted to know that their soldiers were in fact doing their duty, and for that they relied on the captions that went along with the pictures. " These images only obliquelyrepresent the labor of war by recording its pleasurable lulls. By focusing on the officers and portraying them in this stylized manner, the real hardships faced by the troops are minimized". Doing a staged picture in this way doesn't show how hard life is for the soldier on the front line, something that the Queen didn't want the public to see or know about. In this way the Queen could control the opinions of the public, if the real picutes came out the public outcry could have stopped the war or at the very least would have made the Crimean War so unpopular that she, (the Queen) would have to order a stop to it.
The amazing part of this article is that Houston made the assertion that these pictures were made as a or "functioned as souvenirs. This is an aspect that I hadn't thought about before. In some ways I do agree with her in that aspect. At the top of this page, the gentleman on the right side of the picture is that of Capt. George Armstrong Custer, now looking at him sitting in the saddle, his back is arched and not in a comfortable way, now I have ridden a horse before and the way that he is sitting is not a functionable way to sit atop a horse. The contention is that these pictures were made more for the souvenirs aspect of the wars rather than of the historical aspect of the time in which they were made. Nowdays they are a part of history.