Large Format Albumen from Glass Plate Negative by Andrew J. Russell of Confederate Fort Mahone (“Fort Damnation”) – April, 1865 – This large albumen of Ft. Mahone or Confederate Battery #29 is attributed to noted artist and photographer, Captain Andrew J. Russell, Co. F 141^st NY Infantry, taken after the fall of Petersburg, in April of 1865. The image depicts several Union soldiers and officers, including Russell who is seated, seventh from the left, with his arms folded, seated, looking right. Numerous other images, also attributed to Russell, seemingly taken on the same day, show several Confederate fortifications. This rare albumen was printed from a glass plate negative, now housed in the Library of Congress. The albumen is mounted on original, period card stock with an early, crudely inked label that reads: “Rebel Entrenchments”; written in period pencil, on the back of the image is: “Rebel Entrenchments”. Additional Russell images, taken on the same day that this image was taken, identify another officer, also in this image: Capt. John B. Kopp, 2^nd Pa. Heavy Artillery. This a rarely encountered albumen taken by one of the foremost artist and photographers of the 19^th century. It remains in very good condition, exhibiting some minor foxing on the card stock.

Andrew J. Russell

141st NY Infantry
( 3-years )

NEW YORK
ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY-FIRST INFANTRY
(Three Years)

Andrew J. Russell

Nineteenth-century American Civil War and Union Pacific Railroad photographer Andrew J. Russell was born in Walpole, New Hampshire, on March 20, 1829, and raised in New York State. After earning several commissions as a portrait and landscape painter, he helped form a local militia at the outset of the Civil War. He learned photography after joining the Army and, in the spring of 1863, was made the Army’s first official photographer under General Herman Haupt. Following the War he was hired by the Union Pacific Railroad to photographically document the construction and completion of the eastern portion of the American transcontinental railroad.

Russell died in Brooklyn, New York, in September 1902.

A.J. Russell – courtesy of the Getty Museum

Andrew Joseph Russell, a captain in the volunteer infantry, became a photographer during the American Civil War. As photographer-engineer for the United States Military Railroad Construction Corps, he was assigned to photograph battlefields and campsites in Virginia. He also photographed engineering projects and contributed images to what was probably the world’s first technical manual illustrated with photographs.

The Union Pacific Railroad Company later hired Russell to document the building of the transcontinental railroad, creating a visual document “calculated to interest all classes of people, and to excite the admiration of all reflecting minds as the colossal grandeur of the Agricultural, Mineral, and Commercial resources of the West are brought to view.” For about two years following the celebrated driving of the last spike at Promontory Summit, Utah, on May 10, 1869, he continued to photograph the areas around the railroad and began to write dispatches about the West for Eastern newspapers. After he returned to New York, he maintained a photography studio there and never traveled West again.

Russell’s Civil War Photographs (Dover Photography Collections)

by Captain A. J. Russell (Author)

Captain A. J. Russell did not photograph celebrities, run fashionable photo galleries, or publish collections of his “views”; most histories of American photography can barely stretch his biographical data into a paragraph. His peers and superiors recognized the quality of his works, but as with other unassuming photographs of the Civil War, many of his pictures were later attributed to Brady. Yet he is unquestionably a major figure in 10th-century American photography, a pioneer in every sense: he was one of the only two or three official Civil War photographers, perhaps the only one who was also a soldier; after the war he headed west to become the official photographer of the Union Pacific Railroad as it breached the frontier.
Russell’s frontier photographs came to be better known than those he took as engineer-photographer with the elite Railroad Construction Corps, attached to General Grant’s Military Railroad. These early experiences in military photography, however, aside from their contribution to photo-technological development, prove Russell a remarkable camera artist. Here, reproduced from one of the few surviving scrapbooks of his photographs, are 116 rare prints, many never before published, restoring a largely forgotten artist to an audience ready to appreciate him.
Russell’s duty included recording the activities of the crucial Railroad Corps as it helped move the Union Army through Virginia. At the same time, he witnessed and chronicled the campaigns of Fredericksburg, Petersburg, Brandy, and Alexandria, and was there to photograph Richmond in ruins. He documents not only tracks, bridges, depots, and engines of war, but surrounding scenes: Bull Run, Meade’s headquarters at Culpepper and Brandy, burying the dead after the battles of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Court House, Lee’s residence at Arlington, “Fort Hell” and “Fort Damnation,” Libby Prison in Richmond, the Smithsonian Institution, the Capitol, and a heretofore unseen photograph of Lincoln’s funeral car.
The full-page panoramas capture the wastage of war that so shocked the civilian public when first exposed to photographs of battles. There are also “aesthetic” shots, landscapes such as that as Great Falls on the Potomac, which offer relief. New captions and a Preface fill in historical, biographical, bibliographical, and photographic detail. This collection of views by a professional military photographer, perhaps the very first in his profession, is an archive of engineering triumphs and human loss; students of the Civil War will discover views unseen in the standard works, while lovers of photography will rediscover in Russell an early master of the art.

Russell documented bridge building activities, railroad construction techniques, camps and supplies of

the Corps. He also photographed troops, battlefields and combat aftermath scenes. His work provided

some of the most coherent documentation of the war. He photographed at Marye’s Heights during the

battle of Fredricksburg, at Petersburg, Alexandria, and the fall of Richmond.

Russell’s large camera, bottles of chemicals and “window-pane” glass were transported in a crude

horse-drawn darkroom. In spite of the conditions in which Russell worked, the quality of his

photographs is remarkable. The artistic quality and usefulness of his work were both highly valued by

the government in Washington and his images were published in special albums and given to visiting

dignitaries. One of these albums has long been in the Virginia Historical Society Collection in Richmond.

Unfortunately, Russell’s renown as a Civil War photographer was later forgotten and many of his best

images were attributed to Matthew Brady or Brady’s associates. When two more albums of Russell’s

images surfaced in 1978 and 1980, Civil War photo-historians were able to correctly identify these

images as Russell’s work. They also discovered the existence of images that had never been seen

before, such as President Lincoln’s Funeral Car.

Andrew J. Russell’s “United States Military Rail Road Photographic Album,” a magnificent album with

107 albumen prints depicting the railroads, battlefields and landscapes of the Civil War sold at auction

in 2011 for for $156,000.