Picturing the war: Visual genres in civil war news

This study examines the genres of visual communication utilized by the daily and illustrated weekly papers during the Civil War, when photography existed, but photographs could not yet be printed using the halftone process. I propose a typology of visual genres in use at that time, wherein each genre is differentiated by conventions that governed inclusion and interpretation. Though photography could not be reproduced in the news, an ideal of photorealism can be detected in many of these genres, as illustrations were made to approximate the mode of the photograph. This blending of photography and illustration, it is argued, contradicts the assumption of a metaphysical divide between photographic and illustrated representations, and elucidates the role of convention in visual communication.