Mathew Brady

Early Life

• Mathew Brady arrived in New York City at the age of 16.
• Soon after taking a job as a department store clerk, he started his own small business manufacturing jewelry cases.
• In his spare time, Brady studied photography under a number of teachers, including Samuel F. B. Morse, the man who had recently introduced photography to America.

Photography

• By 1844, he had his own photography studio in New York. Brady soon acquired a reputation as one of America's greatest photographers -- producer of portraits of the famous.
• In 1856, he opened a studio in Washington, D.C., to photograph the nation's leaders and foreign dignitaries.
• As he said, "From the first, I regarded myself as under obligation to my country to preserve the faces of its historic men and mothers."

Civil War

• At the peak of his success as a portrait photographer, Brady turned his attention to the Civil War.
• Planning to document the war on a grand scale, he organized a corps of photographers to follow the troops in the field.
• Friends tried to discourage him, citing battlefield dangers and financial risks.
• He later said, "I had to go. A spirit in my feet said 'Go,' and I went."

Civil War-2

• Mathew Brady did not actually shoot many of the Civil War photographs attributed to him. from Antietam, posting a sign on the door of his New York gallery that read, "The Dead of Antietam."
• More of a project manager, he spent most of his time supervising his corps of traveling photographers, preserving their negatives and buying others from private photographers.
• In 1862, Brady shocked America by displaying his photographs of battlefield corpses

Civil War-3

• After the Civil War, Brady found that war-weary Americans were no longer interested in purchasing photographs of the recent bloody conflict.
• Having risked his fortune on his Civil War enterprise, Brady lost the gamble and fell into bankruptcy.
• His negatives were neglected until 1875, when Congress purchased the entire archive for $25,000.

Civil War-4

• 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.

Mathew Brady