The Gardner group and emancipation: abolition and personhood in the work of Alexander Gardner and Scottish emigrant photographers

The photography of Alexander Gardner and his colleagues is well known through their documentation of the American Civil War (1861-1865), with many works in major US museums. Despite this, almost no works by Gardner’s group are held in UK public collections, and the group’s origins are largely ignored. Gardner emigrated to the United States in 1856, where he led a group of predominantly Scottish-born photographers whose biographies are fragmentary and incomplete. Yet between them they produced a landmark document, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (1866), that remains in reproduction to this day. A survey of the group’s origins and output will provide an opportunity to examine its coherence, artistic influences, and its role in reflecting on abolition and emancipation. Gardner was born in Paisley in 1821 and was active as a photographer and Chartist journalist throughout the flourishing of transatlantic Black abolitionist activism, with the town and region visited by Frederick Douglass and other leaders. Yet no previous study has explored the influence of the latter on him, nor have the group’s motivations and attitudes toward emancipation and Black citizenship been investigated. The abolitionism that Gardner professes in the Sketch Book text contrasts with the paternalistic depiction of Black Americans in its photography and in other works by the group, which may be traceable to artistic influences that have not previously been considered. This study responds to recommendation no. 4 in Museums and Galleries Scotland's report Empire, Slavery, and Scotland's Museums: to ‘research, interpret, and share the histories of Scotland’s links to empire, colonialism, and historic slavery’ (2022, 29). The research will use the archives of Paisley Museum to explore connections between the abolitionist and Chartist movements and the creative work the Gardner group produced in Washington after emigration. Research at the National Archives and Research Administration, and the Library of Congress, will examine contemporary records to understand the workings of their gallery operation and to underpin art historical analysis of their portrait practice as it developed. The project aims to: conduct a biographical survey of the group, focused on Gardner’s early life in Paisley and the west of Scotland; deepen our understanding of the visual culture of abolitionism in the region, and its influence; survey the group’s portrait work, produced as they coalesced around Gardner’s business during the period of the war; explore the compatibility of abolitionism with attitudes to Black personhood, as expressed in the work; and inform museum strategy on the collection and acquisition of visual works, like Gardner’s, that have complex meaning in relation to the history and critique of enslavement. Working with Paisley Museum Reimagined and the American Civil War Roundtable (UK), the project will network with academic and public scholarship on the war, on abolitionism in Scotland, on art history, and on photography, and will engage with the question of whether Gardner’s work was in fact instrumental in ‘white thinking’ in the post-bellum United States. (Thuram 2022)