Brady, Mathew B. (1823?-1896)

Mathew B. Brady (1823?-1896)

Source

Photographer

An Odd Little Man. Union soldiers on the way to Bull Run in July 1861 were surprised to see following their column a small, bespectacled civilian with a goatee. He wore a long, white duster coat and a straw hat, and drove a black-curtained wagon. Not knowing what to make of the mysterious stranger, they shrugged him off and dubbed his odd-looking wagon the “Whatisit.” This man was Mathew B. Brady, the leading portrait photographer of Washington, D.C.—one of his subjects had been President Abraham Lincoln. Brady was now about to try something that few had ever attempted: to record on film the actual sights of war. Swept up in the Federal retreat following Bull Run, Brady failed at his first effort. Nevertheless, he persisted and went on to form several photographic teams to cover the Civil War. Today the pictures taken by Brady and his assistants represent landmark achievements in the history of photography.

Background. Brady was born in Warren County, New York, and although the exact year of his birth is not known, historians surmise it was around 1823. In the early 1840s he became interested in photography and was introduced to the daguerreotype process by the inventor Samuel B. Morse. (A daguerreotype was a photograph produced on a silver or silver-covered copper plate). Brady opened his own photography studio in New York City in 1844. Six years later he published his Gallery of Illustrious Americans, which confirmed his reputation as one of the foremost portrait photographers in the nation. In 1855 he experimented successfully with the wet-plate process of photography. When the Civil War began in 1861, he owned a gallery in the nation’s capital, and President Lincoln authorized him to accompany and photograph the armies so that a visual record of the conflict could be preserved. To the consternation of family and friends, Brady took the assignment. As he later explained: “A spirit in my feet said go, and I went.”

In the Field. In the 1860s action photographs were impossible to take because the exposure time (up to ten seconds) required by the wet-plate process blurred all movement. Brady, however, took many static pictures at the First Battle of Bull Run (21 July 1861), and in doing so inadvertently contributed to the rout of Union forces. A newspaper later reported that some of the Northern troops fled after mistaking the huge brass-barreled lens of Brady’s camera for the enemy’s rumored rapid-firing steam cannon. Thereafter Brady and his specially built darkroom wagon were seen on battlefields throughout the war. Brady and his assistants took many memorable scenes of the war, but their views of dead and wounded soldiers did not meet with public approval when they exhibited them in New York and Washington. For the general public, the stark reality of the pictures destroyed all romantic images of the war.

Legacy. The pictures of Brady and other photographers, such as Alexander Gardner and Timothy O’Sullivan, could not be reproduced in newspapers because the technology necessary to do so did not exist. Many of the photos, however, became the basis of line engravings in illustrated publications. When the conflict ended in 1865, war-weary Americans had little interest in buying Brady’s pictures. By that time Brady was in dire financial straits because he had paid for most of his travels and equipment with his own money. In 1875 the government alleviated some of his monetary woes by purchasing part of Brady’s collection. Although private collectors eventually paid high prices for his pictures, Brady never recouped his losses and died in poverty, in New York in 1896. Today many of Brady’s photographs are still used in history books, and a large collection of them is housed in the Library of Congress.

Source

Roy Meredith, Mr. Lincoln’s Camera Man: Mathew B. Brady, second revised edition (New York: Dover, 1974).