Thursday, December 30, 2010

News---Digitized Photograph Gives Up 'Ghosts'

Unfit For Service, Licensed Gettysburg Battlefield Guides, Gettysburg.Daily December 30, 31, 2010.

Gettysburg Daily is offering some amazing work by the GLBG and their digitally inclined friends. An often reproduced photograph of a wrecked artillery caission at Gettysburg has been found to have to contain an wagon train in its bleached out background. Taken from the Library of Congress online collection, the digital historians have darkened the foreground and the background. Some of the detail in foreground is lost but the the bleached horizon now contains a wagon train with a forge wagon and a man with a head wound. The Guides have searched for the location from which the photograph was taken by Alexander Gardner. It appears that they have found several spots. One location is very dramatic. The wrecked artillery caisson possibly "belonged to Hugh Garden’s Palmetto (South Carolina) Artillery that was brought east of the Emmitsburg Road on July 3, 1863, to attempt to protect the right flank of Confederate infantry during Pickett’s Charge" and was wrecked by McGilvery's batteries.

Check out the process of the discovery and the competing notions of where the photograph were taken. Visit Gettysburg Daily's entries for December 30 and 31.

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