The Center for Civil War Photography, Inc., and Civil War Life - The Soldier's Museum are proud to announce the opening of an exhibition of original Civil War photographic prints featuring some of the finest images taken in the Commonwealth of Virginia during the conflict.
The exhibition features 18 vintage, original Civil War photographs from Virginia taken by Alexander Gardner and his associates, as well as a variety of other wartime images, including card photographs, stereo views and cased images.

Most of the large images in the exhibition are 140-year-old direct contact albumen prints from Gardner's Photographic Sketchbook of the Civil War, an elaborate, two-volume set produced in 1865 and 1866 that contained 100 prints. The seven-by-nine inch prints are pasted onto letterpress printed board mounts that are original pages from unbound copies of the Sketchbook.

"To see familiar images of the war in their original presentation format is to see them in a whole, new way," CCWP President Bob Zeller writes in the exhibition's introductory text. "The actual panes of glass that were in the cameras on the battlefields of Virginia, exposed to the sun as they faced these unforgettably historic scenes, were put in physical touch with each of the paper prints on display here."

The large negatives - massive by 35mm standards - gave these prints a richness of detail unmatched by most modern copy prints and reproductions. As the late Civil War historian Brian Pohanka said: "There's nothing that compares to looking at original Civil War photographs. The clarity and dimension just draw you into them."