GDG- Devil's Den Sharpshooter

[cameron2 at optonline.net]

<<  From what I can gather is that the sharpshooter photo was decided to be a fake based on William Frassanito's study of the six extant photos of the area in his book, "Gettysburg, A Journey in Time". >>

John,

I'm not sure I'd call it faked, so much as simply staged for dramatic effect.  Not terribly uncommon.  

Groves goes into such endless detail that his analysis may seem convincing if for no other reason than the depth in which he examines every little part of the image.  

Now, I personally don't care all that much whether the body was dragged to the "Shrine" (as Mr. Groves calls it in his prints) or from it.  Personally, I think Bill Frassanito is correct in his analysis, and that it's more likely the body was found in a generic, nondescript location and moved to the sharpshooter position for "artistic" reasons.  Could it have been the other way around?  Sure, why not?  I wasn't there that day.

Where Groves looses me isn't so much on the question of which way the body was moved, but rather, his contentions that the picture itself was somehow altered and faked after it was taken.  "Far-fetched" is IMO a mild term for some of the changes he alleges were made to the image.  And as I said earlier, who would have bothered?  Nobody back at the time this image was being sold was going to care one way or the other how the body got where it was.  It was just an interesting photograph of a dead soldier on the battlefield.  Even if the photographic techniques of the day would have allowed the kind of changes Groves alleges were made to the image, what possible motive would there have been for going to all that trouble?