Gardner's Gallery, 7th and D Streets, Washington, D.C.

The tremendous changes underway in the medium of photography in the early 1860s are documented in the wealth of advertising covering the two façades of the Washington, D.C., gallery of Alexander Gardner. In autumn 1862 Gardner left his employer Mathew B. Brady to start his own portrait gallery. This view of Gardner’s corner business at 7th and D streets shows a four-story building festooned with signs for virtually every type of image available at the time except the tintype: cartes de visite, stereographs, album cards, Imperial photographs (plain, colored, and retouched), ambrotypes, hallotypes, and ivorytypes. The largest sign reads "Views of the War." If Brady had perhaps conceived the grand idea of an epic documentation of the Civil War, it was Gardner who actually executed it, both before and after the two gallerists separated.

Credit: Gilman Collection, Museum Purchase, 2005