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 and along the streets, he has done something very like it. At the door of his gallery hangs a little placard, "The Dead of Antietam."
- excerpt from a New York Times article published on October 20, 1862
Alexander Gardner took 70 photographs of the battlefield starting just two days after the battle. This was the first time an American battlefield had ever been photographed before the dead had been buried. Gardner, who was working for famed photographer Mathew Brady at the time, stayed four days photographing the dead of Antietam. These pictures were then put on display in Brady's New York studio.
