Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter

Common card · No. 410949

Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter is a staged war photograph taken by Timothy O'Sullivan, assistant to Alexander Gardner, after the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863. Gardner published the photograph in Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War after the war, claiming that the subject was a Confederate sharpshooter who had been mortally wounded by a shell fragment during the battle. In 1961, it was suggested in a magazine article that the photograph had been staged, with the corpse appearing in other photographs taken by the Gardner team in another location on the battlefield. This was discussed more thoroughly in 1975 by photographic historian William A. Frassanito, who demonstrated that the photograph was one of six taken of the same body, which had originally been located on the south edge of the Devil's Den before being moved next to a stone wall within the Devil's Den area. The rifle is not that of a sharpshooter and was likely a prop, and the corpse was likely not a sharpshooter...

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