Why Can’t We Turn Our Eyes Away From the Grotesque and Macabre?

This week's shooting of two news reporters in Roanoke, Virginia, captured once on live television by the slain camerman, and then again by the gunman, who took video as he aimed and fired, adding an extra layer of horror to the violence. Through the killer's lens, we are looking through his gunsights and the effect is profoundly disturbing. And we cannot look away.

In the fall of 1862, Alexander Gardner, scenting a commercial opportunity, took his camera out to a battlefield near Sharpsburg, Maryland, and made the photographs that became known as The Dead at Antietam. Displayed to the public, and available for purchase at Mathew Brady’s Manhattan gallery (Gardner worked for Brady at the time), their effect was electrifying. The New York Times wrote that the photographs had a “terrible distinctness” and that they brought the sobering, tragic reality of war home to the north. The emphasis was clearly on the documentary truth of the photographs and how that truth then impacted Northern culture, including not just its art and literature, but its emotions and habits of feeling. Historians from Edmund Wilson to Drew Gilpin Faust have charted the way that the Civil War was a watershed in the transformation in American culture, in everything from the way we write to mourning rituals. Gardner’s photographs, by bringing the war home, clearly played a role in this transformation to what we can loosely call Modernism.  continue