War Views: A Dead Rebel Soldier, as he lay in the trenches of "Fort Hell",

April 2, 1865

<p>Undeterred by dangerous circumstances and motivated by commercial success, Thomas C. Roche was among the few battlefield photographers to remain near the Petersburg, Virginia, front during the last days of the Civil War, producing one of the most extensive series of battlefield views. This photograph shows the body of a Confederate soldier at the Union Army’s Fort Sedgwick, which soldiers nicknamed “Fort Hell.” Like many other Civil War photographers, including Mathew Brady, Roche did not simply photograph the scenes he found but manipulated bodies and objects for aesthetic effect. Clear evidence of this intervention is the position of the soldier’s gun, which could not have fallen across the soldier’s torso naturally. Roche placed the gun onto the soldier’s body, creating a diagonal line that enlivens the composition and parallels the diagonals of the musket and the wooden structure behind him. The positioning of the soldier’s body—with his back arched and his face angled toward the viewer—heightens the drama of the photograph, endowing the subject with dignity and pathos. Such manipulations may have been inspired by the conventions of antebellum post-mortem photography or by the compositions of history painting. <em>A Dead Rebel Soldier</em> was one of the most reproduced photographs in Roche’s <em>War Views</em> series, which was published by the New York–based photographic distributors Edward and Henry T. Anthony and therefore likely catered to Northern audiences.</p><p>This photograph is a stereograph, a format that places two images taken at slightly different angles side by side on a single card. When viewed through a binocular device called a stereoscope, the two images coalesce into one, producing an illusion of three-dimensionality. Widely distributed to convey narratives related to the recent war and a rebuilding nation, these stereographs serve as examples of photography’s role as a tool of mass communication.</p>