Mathew Brady

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Mathew B. Brady

Mathew B. Brady, self-portrait, circa 1875
Born 1822
Warren County, New York, U.S.A.
Died January 15, 1896 (aged 73)
New York City, New York, U.S.A.
Occupation Photographer, photojournalist
Nationality  United States
Spouse(s) Juliette Handy Brady
Note: Mathew B. Brady's name contains a single "t". For persons named Matthew Brady, see Matthew Brady (disambiguation).

Mathew B. Brady (1822 - January 15, 1896) was one of the most celebrated 19th century American photographers, best known for his portraits of celebrities and the documentation of the American Civil War. He is credited with being the father of photojournalism.[1]

Contents

[edit] Early years

Brady was born in Warren County, New York, to Irish immigrant parents, Andrew and Julia Brady. He moved to New York City at the age of 17. By 1844, he had his own photography studio in New York, and by 1845, Brady began to exhibit his portraits of famous Americans. He opened a studio in Washington, D.C. in 1849, where he met Juliette Handy, whom he married in 1851. Brady's early images were daguerreotypes, and he won many awards for his work; in the 1850s ambrotype photography became popular, which gave way to the albumen print, a paper photograph produced from large glass negatives most commonly used in the American Civil War photography. In 1859, Parisian photographer André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri popularized the carte de visite and these small pictures (the size of a visiting card) rapidly became a popular novelty as thousands of these images were created and sold in the United States and Europe.

In 1856 Brady created the first modern advertisement when he placed an ad in the New York Herald paper offering to produce "photographs, ambrotypes and daguerreotypes."[2] His ads were the first whose typeface and fonts were distinct from the text of the publication and from that of other advertisements.[3]

[edit] Civil War documentation

Brady's efforts to document the Civil War on a grand scale by bringing his photographic studio right onto the battlefields earned Brady his place in history. Despite the obvious dangers, financial risk, and discouragement of his friends, Brady is later quoted as saying "I had to go. A spirit in my feet said 'Go,' and I went." His first popular photographs of the conflict were at the First Battle of Bull Run, in which he got so close to the action that he only just avoided being captured.[4].

Photograph of Abraham Lincoln taken by Brady on February 27, 1860 in New York City, the day of Lincoln's Cooper Union speech.

He employed Alexander Gardner, James Gardner, Timothy H. O'Sullivan, William Pywell, George N. Barnard, Thomas C. Roche, and seventeen other men, each of whom was given a traveling darkroom, to go out and photograph scenes from the Civil War. Brady generally stayed in Washington, D.C., organizing his assistants and rarely visited battlefields personally. This may have been due, at least in part, to the fact that Brady's eyesight had begun to deteriorate in the 1850s.

In October 1862, Brady presented an exhibition of photographs from the Battle of Antietam in his New York gallery entitled, "The Dead of Antietam." Many of the images in this presentation were graphic photographs of corpses, a presentation totally new to America. This was the first time that many Americans saw the realities of war in photographs as distinct from previous "artists' impressions".

Following the conflict, a war-weary public lost interest in seeing photos of the war, and Brady’s popularity and practice declined drastically.

[edit] Later years and death

Brady, just before his death.

During the war Brady spent over $100,000 to create over 10,000 plates. He expected the U.S. government to buy the photographs when the war ended, but when the government refused to do so he was forced to sell his New York City studio and go into bankruptcy. Congress granted Brady $25,000 in 1875, but he remained deeply in debt. Depressed by his financial situation, loss of eyesight and devastated by the death of his wife in 1887, he became very lonely. Mathew Brady died penniless in the charity ward of Presbyterian Hospital in New York City, at five o'clock, on January 15, 1896, from complications following a streetcar accident.

Brady's funeral was financed by veterans of the 7th New York Infantry. He was buried in Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C.

Levin Corbin Handy, Brady's nephew by marriage, took over his uncle's photography business after his death.

[edit] Legacy and people photographed

Grave of Mathew Brady.

Brady photographed 18 of the 19 American Presidents from John Quincy Adams to William McKinley. The exception was the 9th President, William Henry Harrison, who died in office three years before Brady started his Photographic Collection.

The thousands of photographs Mathew Brady took have become the most important visual documentation of the Civil War, and have helped historians better understand the era.

Brady photographed and made portraits of many senior Union officers in the war, including Ulysses S. Grant, Nathaniel Banks, Don Carlos Buell, Ambrose Burnside, Benjamin Butler, Joshua Chamberlain, George Custer, David Farragut, John Gibbon, Winfield Hancock, Samuel P. Heintzelman, Joseph Hooker, Oliver Howard, David Hunter, John A. Logan, Irvin McDowell, George McClellan, James McPherson, George Meade, Montgomery C. Meigs, David Dixon Porter, William Rosecrans, John Schofield, William Sherman, Daniel Sickles, Henry Warner Slocum, George Stoneman, Edwin V. Sumner, George Thomas, Emory Upton, James Wadsworth, and Lew Wallace.

On the Confederate side, Brady photographed P. G. T. Beauregard, Stonewall Jackson, James Longstreet, Lord Lyons, James Henry Hammond, and Robert E. Lee. (Lee's first session with Brady was in 1845 as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, his final after the war in Richmond, Virginia.)

Brady also photographed Abraham Lincoln on many occasions. His Lincoln photographs have been used for the $5 dollar bill and the Lincoln penny.

Brady produced over seven thousand pictures (mostly two negatives of each). One set "after undergoing extraordinary vicissitudes," came into U.S. government possession. His own negatives passed in the 1870s to E. & H.T. Anthony, of New York, in default of payment for photographic supplies. They "were kicked about from pillar to post" for ten years, until John C. Taylor found them in an attic and bought them; from this they became "the backbone of the Ordway-Rand collection; and in 1895 Brady himself had no idea of what had become of them. Many were broken, lost, or destroyed by fire. After passing to various other owners, they were discovered and appreciated by Edward Bailey Eaton," who set in motion "events that led to their importance as the nucleus of a collection of Civil War photos published in 1912 as The Photographic History of the Civil War.[5]

[edit] In Popular Culture

The Franco-Belgian comics series Les Tuniques Bleues ("The Blue Coats") is set during the Civil War, being largely humorous in tone. One episode, Des bleus en noir et blanc (Blues in Black and White), published in 1975, featured Brady going to the front line in order to take photos. He is depicted as being extremely calm under pressure, even in the midst of battle — at one stage even asking the combatants to stand still as he takes a photo, as if they were a family group. This attitude frustrates the soldiers charged with escorting him, especially when they get too close to the fighting. One of them gets so furious with Brady that he even physically assaults him with his camera. Although seriously injured as a result, Brady takes it all very calmly, defending the soldiers on the basis that his actions got them into a dangerous position. When later the battle goes badly for them, Brady helps President Lincoln escape in his traveling darkroom.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Horan, James D. (1988-12-12). Mathew Brady: Historian With a Camera. New York: Random House. ISBN 0517001047. 
  2. ^ Volo, James M. (2004). The Antebellum Period. Greenwood Press. pp. 106. ISBN 0313325189. http://books.google.com/books?q=Matthew+Brady+broke+through+newspaper+industry+prohibitions+&btnG=Search+Books. 
  3. ^ http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/eaa/timeline.html
  4. ^ Although Brady was photographed wearing a sword under his linen duster and claimed to have received the weapon at First Bull Run from the 11th New York Infantry-{See Miller's "Photographic History of the Civil War" Vol 1 .p.31}-there is doubt as to whether he took pictures at the Battle. See Frassantito's "Antietam"{reference only}}
  5. ^ The Photographic History of the Civil War, in Ten Volumes, Francis Trevelyan Miller, editor-in-chief, and Robert S. Lanier, Managing Editor, The Review of Reviews Co., New York, 1912., p. 52

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Sister project Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Mathew Brady


Persondata
NAME Brady, Mathew B.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION American photographer
DATE OF BIRTH ca. 1823
PLACE OF BIRTH Warren County, New York
DATE OF DEATH 1896-01-15
PLACE OF DEATH Presbyterian Hospital, New York City, New York
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathew_Brady"
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