Home Of A Rebel Sharpshooter

One of the most reproduced photographs of the Civil War was taken at Devil's Den on 6 July 1863, and it was staged. Alexander Gardner and his assistant Timothy O'Sullivan titled it Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter: a young Confederate lying behind a neat stone barricade in the rocks, rifle propped beside him, apparently killed at his post. It is a composition, and every part of it that makes it work was arranged. In 1975 the photographic historian William Frassanito went through the surviving negatives and found six exposures of the same body in two different places, four where the man actually lay on the slope at the southern end of Devil's Den and two at the barricade. He had been carried about seventy yards, laid out on his back, and given a rifle. The rifle was not a sharpshooter's weapon; it turns up in other Gardner photographs and was almost certainly a prop the crew carried with them. The dead man was in all likelihood an ordinary infantryman. None of that makes the picture a lie about the war, which is why it still holds. It does make it a made thing rather than a found one, at a moment when photographs were being received as plain evidence. The barricade is still in the rocks here, but the stones are not the ones in the photograph: the Park Service rebuilt it, so what stands is a reconstruction of a scene that was itself constructed.