Russell’s Civil War Photographs

Rating:
Summary: utterly fascinating...
Review: Less known than the Brady team photographs, Russell, in his capacity as a photographer for the Railroad Contruction Corps, shows us another side of the Civil War. We see the City Point docks & railroad yards, barracks & arsenals, Lincoln's private railroad car, bridges, fortifications, ships, huge stables, derricks & the ruins of Richmond. This book is a military engineer's view of the war. I find these photographs blunt, realistic, artless (in the sense of time they were made) & utterly fascinating. Dover publishes fine books at excellent prices.

Bob Rixon, WFMU-FM

Rating:
Summary: utterly fascinating...
Review: Less known than the Brady team photographs, Russell, in his capacity as a photographer for the Railroad Contruction Corps, shows us another side of the Civil War. We see the City Point docks & railroad yards, barracks & arsenals, Lincoln's private railroad car, bridges, fortifications, ships, huge stables, derricks & the ruins of Richmond. This book is a military engineer's view of the war. I find these photographs blunt, realistic, artless (in the sense of time they were made) & utterly fascinating. Dover publishes fine books at excellent prices.

Bob Rixon, WFMU-FM

Rating:
Summary: A different chronicle of the civil war
Review: The American civil war was the defining event in American social cohesion and fortunately, it was also the first event that could be permanently chronicled with photos. While Mathew Brady is the best known photographer of that time, there were others who also contributed to the permanent record. Andrew Russell was a photographer whose work dealt primarily with the Railroad Corps of the Union Army as it moved through Virginia. As such, his photos are rarely of battle scenes, they show us buildings, bridges, brestworks and encampments.
While these photos lack the immediate power of battle scenes, they are very well done and show a different side of the war. The clarity and detail in the pictures are amazing, in some cases, you can even count the bricks on the sides of the buildings. Russell was an excellent photographer, his work is simple, yet powerful as it shows us the physical structure of two sides of a society at war with itself.