“I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now”

Originally published October 2019 · p. 41

Some of us old-timers can remember Judy Collins’ hit, “Both Sides Now” (1968), in which she sings of gazing at clouds in the sky.

Well, that’s what George Barnard invites us to do in his Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign. The album of sixty-one photographic plates was produced by Barnard in 1866 in some 100 to 150 copies. Each featured pictures taken by the photographer as he traveled with Sherman’s army during the war and in spring 1866, when he returned to the South.

Barnard’s Photographic Views is reprinted in Keith F. Davis’ definitive George N. Barnard: Photographer of Sherman’s Campaign (Kansas City, 1990). In it Davis observes that by careful double printing, Barnard could add clouds to the skylines of his war scenes for aesthetic effect.

Theodore Davis, the Harpers Weekly illustrator whom Barnard had met during Sherman’s Georgia campaign, was assisting him with the Photographic Views album when he wrote Capt. Orlando Poe (Sherman’s former chief engineer) on Sept. 9, 1866: “Barnard has by a new process (double printing) got the most beautiful clouds in his prints, which excel any thing that I have ever seen in the way of photograph[y].” Keith Davis notes that Barnard had not invented the double-printing process, but adds that it was still relatively new when Barnard employed it in 1866.

Those clouds moved around, as one can see in plate 24, “Allatoona from the Etawah,” and plate 46, “City of Atlanta, Ga., No. 2.”

They’re the same cloud formation!

This is just another example of the fun to be had in Barnardiana—studying the work of the Civil War western theater’s very best photographer.