Slide 1 of 13,

This exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art reflects “a time when photography and political history intersected and inextricably fused,” Ken Johnson writes.

“A Burial Party, Cold Harbor, Virginia, April 1865” by John Reekie.

Mr. Johnson writes, “If this were a painted image, it could be an allegory of the end of slavery. That it is a photograph makes a big difference. The men, dead and alive, were certainly real, and so were the circumstances that brought them to this moment. Nevertheless the photographer has altered history. At least one man is posing in a way that he would be unlikely to have done otherwise. How much else was changed? Did Reekie find the skulls as they are in his picture, or was it his idea to arrange them thus to line up with a living man’s head? Did he instruct the men in the background to assume digging postures? How true to life is this picture after all? And if there is something true about it, what kind of truth does it offer its viewer?”