George Barnard

George N. Barnard was one of Mathew Brady’s photographers who, like Alexander Gardner, would split from his employer to further his own career. Barnard had opened a daguerreotype studio in Oswego, New York, in 1846 and was a pioneer in the field of documentary photography, capturing dramatic views of a huge mill fire in 1853. He later worked for other photographers, including Brady, who hired him in the late 1850s. While Brady and Gardner concentrated on the eastern theaters, Barnard went south and west, following William T. Sherman’s army—most noticeably on its famous “March to the Sea” in 1864. Barnard traveled back to the South after the war, documenting the cost of war in his 1866 publication Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign.