The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, USA, has an exhibition entitled Photography and the American Civil War. This war—its documentation, its soldiers, its battlefields—was the arena of the camera's debut in America.

This depicts the aftermath of the destruction of a Confederate military train filled with gunpowder. When abandoning Atlanta, Confederate General John Bell Hood ordered his troops to set the boxcars on fire so that the Union army would never be able to make use of the train. The explosion also completely leveled the nearby mill, leaving evidence of only a few rail wheels and axles.

Barnard worked for the well-known studio of Mathew Brady, both in New York and Washington, D.C. His duties included studio portraiture as well as non-studio group portraiture of the troops assembled in Washington at the start of the Civil War. His views of Civil War battlegrounds---Nashville, the Chattanooga Valley, Atlanta, and Savannah, as well as other sites associated with General Sherman's command, were sometimes taken months after the battles.