Samuel Cooley on the Parapet

Samuel A. Cooley stands with his camera on the battered parapet of Fort Sumter.

Cooley styled himself photographer of the Department of the South, worked out of Hilton Head and Beaufort, and followed the Federal forces along the South Carolina coast with a wagon outfit. He was one of a small number of operators — Barnard, Haas and Peale, George Cook among them — whose plates are now nearly the whole visual record of this campaign.

Photographs of photographers at work are uncommon and disproportionately useful. Everything about the process is in this frame: the size of the camera, the tripod it needed, the fact that the man had to stand in the open on a wrecked parapet to get his angle, and — implied, just out of shot — the darkroom wagon or tent that had to be within a few minutes' walk, because a wet collodion plate had to be coated, exposed and developed before it dried.

Every other photograph in this collection was made by a man doing exactly what Cooley is doing here.