Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteTo date, my intended prints have been sepia toned, but I have twice worked with "day-into-night" techniques, and with this one, the full-sized, fully printable Nikon D2x RAW file. While there is a stubbled field to the viewer's right and adjacent to the lane named to pass beside "The Cornfield", this is the corn field planted behind Miller's Farm and facing in the distance a contemporary "East Woods".
In his book, Antietam: The Photographic Legacy of America's Bloodiest Day, author William A. Frassanito painstakingly locates the position from which Alexander Gardner, the Brady Studio employe (along with peer and assistant James F. Gibson), made stereographs starting two days after the battle. In numerous examples, the "lay of the land"--its essential shape and features--has not changed, but natural and human alterations are rife. Whatever the battle may have done to the East Woods, it's a sure bet farming, road building, and time have done much more. In point of fact, the natural--grass and dirt--service lane beside the cornfield pictured featured small bumps of macadam beneath where I walked, perhaps one of many small signals of National Park Service intent to accommodate the land's farmers, in this instance, by producing additional buffer, while returning the historic property to its mid-19th Century state..
1. Frassanito, William A. Antietam: The Photographic Legacy of America's Bloodiest Day. Gettysburg, PA: Thomas Publications, 1978.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
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