When Seeing Makes Scents

Abstract

In their enthusiasm for ferreting out the smells, tastes, touches, and sounds of the past, historians of the senses have encountered an irony in their emerging field: technologies such as print and photography that supposedly diluted modernity’s interest in the nonvisual senses have, in fact, helped to capture a great deal of evidence about all the senses. Visual evidence—texts, diagrams, photographs—can be read for sensory clues, not only yielding information about what each sense meant for different groups of people but also granting us access to intersensoriality—how the senses worked together to give events and moments in the past meaning and texture.1 Deliberately then, I begin this essay on the smell of the past with an image (fig. 1). Taken about three days after Confederate soldiers had been killed near the Rose Woods in Pennsylvania on July 2, 1863, this is among the first pictures of the battle of Gettysburg made by the early pioneers of photojournalism: Alexander Gardner, Timothy O’Sullivan, James F. Gibson. That they were not above staging their photographs, arranging and contorting dead limbs, matters little for our purposes. What is important is the suggestive power of the photograph, the way in which the image both captures the grim sight of war and holds a sensory potential. This picture contains the stench of death and battle. To understand the olfactory potential of Gardner’s photograph, one that goes beyond a visual understanding of the Civil War’s most destructive battle, requires us to explore an irony and consider the preeminent importance of historical context. In the burgeoning field of sensory history, the irony has to do with the sorts of evidence historians of the senses deploy. Scholars have recently begun to search out references to smells, tastes, touches, and sounds using largely visual sources. Alone, Gardner’s photograph only hints at olfaction. I study it and see quiet gestures toward what that scene must have smelled like. But these are inspired imaginings, unverifiable from the photograph alone. Read in conjunction with other sources (diaries, letters), smell becomes an important signature, animating our understanding of Gettysburg. Context allows us to read Gardner’s photograph at once more precisely but also more expansively. First, consider the weather. It was mostly hot and humid, with daytime highs in the seventies and eighties. Sweat odorized Mark M. Smith