Mathew B. Brady - Civil War Photographer

Mathew B. Brady
(1823 - 1896)

American photographer whose photographs of the American Civil War and of famous Americans document a significant part of the country's history. One of the first American photographic entrepreneurs.

Like artists, but with greater flexibility and on a much larger scale, photographers recorded contemporary events. One of the greatest photographic documents of history-in-the-making is also one of the earliest: the pictures of the American Civil War, made by perhaps 20 photographers, most of them initially under the direction of Mathew B. Brady. With their clumsy equipment, they could not yet capture the action of battle. Nevertheless, their blunt views of unprepossessing landscapes, littered with the dead, and their frank records of drab camp life changed the popular vision of war; the brutal fact as captured in a photograph was more persuasive than the romantic fiction

Mathew Brady was born in Warren County, New York, the son of Irish immigrant farmers. Aspiring to a career as a painter, he moved around 1839 to Saratoga, New York, to study with William Page, a prominent American portrait artist. Brady is thought to have learned about the daguerreotype, the first practical photographic process, from American artist and inventor Samuel F. B. Morse, who was a friend of Page's. Morse, in turn, had learned about the process in Paris from the inventor himself, Louis J. M. Daguerre.

By 1844 Brady had opened the first of several photographic studios in New York City, where he began making portraits of many of the notable figures of his day. In 1845 he began to make a series of portraits of famous Americans, which he published as The Gallery of Illustrious Americans (1850). He thrived as a businessman, and by 1860 he had two more studios (a second in New York City and another in Washington, D.C.) through which he maintained a thriving portrait business.

He made more than one-third of the 100 known photographs of Abraham Lincoln. The Civil War offered new scope for Brady's ambition. At an expense that depleted his fortune, he outfitted perhaps as many as 20 photographers to cover all fronts. Their equipment was too cumbersome to capture action, but their thousands of pictures showed war in a new and brutal light.

Brady's photo outfit in front of Petersburg, Va (c 1864)

The war photographs, made with the new wet-plate collodion negative process were widely exhibited, and pictures such as Union Casualties at Gettysburg (1863) revealed to civilians the true horror of battlefield death. In October 1862, the New York Times said of Brady's photographs taken at the Battle of Antietam, "If he [Brady] has not brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards and along our streets, he has done something very like it."

(Inscription on photograph): "Brady, the photographer, returned from Bull Run - July 22, 1861"

He also photographed presidents John Quincy Adams and Zachary Taylor; the president of the Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis; writers Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe; and a host of presidential cabinet members, generals, and other government officials.

By the accepted convention of studio photography, Brady's name appeared on all the images. Among Brady's best Civil War photographers were Alexander Gardner and Timothy O'Sullivan, both of whom left Brady's employ in 1863.

Expecting that both the government and individual collectors would eventually buy his war photographs, Brady went deeply into debt, eventually spending more than $100,000 on equipment and staff. In the years following the war, his images lost their appeal with a public eager to forget the conflict, and his portrait business was hurt by an economic recession. Brady sold his Washington gallery at auction in 1868 to pay debts. He continued to operate a succession of smaller Washington studios, photographing many official visitors and delegations, but he was forced to file for bankruptcy in 1873. Two years later Congress awarded him a token $25,000 for his Civil War negatives and prints.

Brady's debts swallowed the entire sum. He died in 1896, penniless and unappreciated. In his final years, Brady said, "No one will ever know what I went through to secure those negatives. The world can never appreciate it. It changed the whole course of my life."

Despite his financial failure, Mathew Brady had a great and lasting effect on the art of photography. His war scenes demonstrated that photographs could be more than posed portraits, and his efforts represent the first instance of the comprehensive photo-documentation of a war.

Photographer Mathew B. Brady (1889)

(See Bibliography below)

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Photographs: Library of Congress
Bibliography: Horan, James D., Mathew Brady: Historian with a Camera (1955); Kunhardt, D. M. and P. B., Mathew Brady and His World (1977); Meredith, Roy, Mr. Lincoln's Camera Man, 2d rev. ed. (1974).