Alexander Gardner: The mysteries of the Civil War’s photographic giant

On a fall day in 1893, an itinerant photographer began rooting through a huge collection of dust-covered glass negatives that had been stashed under the stairs of an old house on Pennsylvania Avenue.

From dingy boxes he pulled portraits of Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant and George B. McClellan, stark pictures of the hanging of the Lincoln conspirators and shots of the Civil War battlefield at Antietam.

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(Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution) - Alexander Gardner, shown here in an 1863 Albumen silver print, died at age 61 on Dec. 10, 1882 in his home on Virginia Avenue SW. He was buried two days later in Northeast Washington’s Glenwood Cemetery after a large, well-attended funeral that was noted by the press.Mathew B. Brady, his former employer and rival Civil War photographer, outlived him by almost 14 years. But Brady, who was in his early 70s, died penniless in New York City on Jan. 15, 1896.His body was shipped to Washington, where he was buried in Congressional Cemetery in his late wife’s family plot. He was placed in a grave already occupied by two relatives, after a funeral that cost $6.The two photography pioneers, who once had Washington studios blocks from each other, are now at rest just four miles apart.

It was an astonishing find. Thirty years after the war, on the cusp of the 20th century, he had rediscovered lost work of one of the conflict’s most important and forgotten figures: the Washington photographer Alexander Gardner.

Although often overshadowed by his former employer, Mathew B. Brady, Gardner was the one who actually took many of the war’s most famous, and unsettling, pictures.

It was Gardner who took the portraits of a gaunt and exhausted Lincoln weeks before his assassination.

It was Gardner who shot the ghastly photos of the dead at Antietam — history’s first photographs, experts say, of slain Americans on a battlefield.

And it was Gardner who captured the execution of the four bound and hooded assassination conspirators in Washington in 1865.

Although Brady is known as the father of Civil War photography, it was Gardner who took so many of the pictures that have defined the event for posterity.

Gardner “took more photos than anybody else,” said Bob Zeller, president and co-founder of the Center for Civil War Photography. “Gardner’s collection is, in terms of outdoor photographs . . . the most extensive collection of Civil War photography that exists.”

When the shocking Antietam photos went on exhibit in Brady’s gallery in New York in 1862, the New York Times wrote: “Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards . . . he has done something very like it.”

But Gardner had taken the pictures.

With the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, the National Portrait Gallery is preparing a major exhibit on Gardner’s work.

Scheduled for 2014, it is planned as the capstone of the gallery’s commemoration of the war’s 150th anniversary, said Frank Goodyear, associate curator of photographs.

Gardner’s “life . . . is little understood,” he said. “There still is a lot of new information to be learned about who . . . [he]was and the pictures that he was taking.”

Gardner died and was buried in Washington 129 years ago this month — his career in photography past, his war over and his historic pictures of little interest to the government. His gallery at Seventh and D streets had been closed for almost a decade. And many of his negatives were scattered, sold or lost.

But fellow photographer J. Watson Porter — who had worked for Gardner as a young man years before — remembered them. In 1893, he tracked down hundreds in the old house on Pennsylvania Avenue and showed them to a newspaper reporter.

“That this collection could have been for so many years hidden and neglected in the heart of a city like Washington is remarkable,” the reporter wrote in The Washington Post. “But the collection tells its own story.”