The Horse Line

A mounted line stretches across the middle distance from edge to edge of the frame — an artillery unit drawn up with its horses on the flat sand under a heavy sky, too far off for faces, close enough to count.

Haas & Peale pointed the camera at formation rather than at individuals, which is its own kind of record: the strength of a battery on parade, in the siege summer of 1863, on an island where every horse had been landed through the surf or over an engineer's wharf.