One complaint that Morton has against the Pilgrims is that t…
One complaint that Morton has against the Pilgrims is that they despise “The Lady of Learning” and vilify which institutions “with uncivil terms”?
One complaint that Morton has against the Pilgrims is that t…
Questions
One cоmplаint thаt Mоrtоn hаs against the Pilgrims is that they despise "The Lady of Learning" and vilify which institutions "with uncivil terms"?
Finаlly, а wild cаrd. This slightly disturbing Civil War phоtоgraph is called A Mоrning’s Work, taken by Union surgeon Reed Bontecou in 1865, depicts the amputated feet of soldiers. His images were likely among the first instance of photographs made for medical purposes. Most of Bontecou's photographs were for teaching or documentation purposes. When soldiers applied for amputees' pensions, they needed proof of their injuries, and Bontecou's photographs of the soldiers, their wounds and procedures, were definitive. Most of his images were usually of a living soldier with his injury clearly visible. While these can be intimate and vulnerable photographs, this one is different. A Morning's Work is more like older genres of paintings and photographs: it's either a portrait of body parts, a still-life of dead amputations, a battlefield photo made of feet rather than dead bodies, or a postmortem photograph (in the nineteenth century people would sometimes take a posed photograph of a recently deceased loved one, because they did have a live photograph of that person). The photograph cannot have practical use; it can't establish whose feet these are, despite the inclusion of a few labels. They also appear to have been arranged in a particular configuration; it is almost impossible that they landed that way. Source: Young, Elizabeth. “Footnotes: Amputation and Reconstruction in Reed Bontecou’s Civil War Photography.” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 70/71, no. 4, 2017, pp. 487–504. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26889946. Accessed 9 Dec. 2024. Question: What do you imagine the surgeon photographer's purpose was in arranging and taking this photograph, and why do you think that? How does this photograph resemble a battlefield photograph? A portrait? A still life? How does it influence your understanding of the Civil War?