14/11/2025
Winner of our 2025 Portraiture Award, Drew Gardner is an innovative portrait photographer who has attracted global interest for his project recreating portraits of Black American Civil War soldiers.
For over 20 years Drew has been recreating famous paintings of historical figures using their real-life descendants. But for the 'Civil War Descendants' project he tracked down the descendants of soldiers and used an authentic Victorian technology of the period: the tintype process, in which metal plates were hand-coated with light sensitive emulsion and exposed in a giant mahogany plate camera, with exposures times of up to 40 seconds.
The Civil War Descendants project took four years to complete, "we combed archives in fine detail for photographs of black civil war combatants who were identified and had a name attached to the picture. You need a name to go on, otherwise you don’t have a hope of finding descendants.
We gathered pictures from all over the place including the Library of Congress, private collections, colleges and the National Park service, and found about 120 with names on. We passed them on to the WikiTree group who came back to us with 25 people they believed had living descendants. Then we went through the painstaking process of tracking them down, getting in touch with them and inviting them to take part. From the inception of the idea to the ex*****on, it took four years."
In his talk at Festival of Photography on Saturday 31 January, Drew will be telling the incredible story behind it, from working with the WikiTree US Black Heritage genealogy project to find archive photos of named black soldiers, to tracing the descendants of soldiers and recreating costumes using authentic materials. Intrigued? Get your early bird ticket now to secure your spot in his talk: https://www.kelsey.events/FestivalofPhotography #/?affl=apsocialmedia
📷 Drew Gardner
