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Picture of the day -
August 8, 2006
Civil War Photographer Mathew Brady
Click photo to enlarge
Like most Americans, you have probably seen at least a couple of
the faded black & white photographs taken during the Civil War, and
you might even know that many of the most popular ones are
attributed to legendary photographer Mathew Brady. But did you know
that many of the images attributed to Brady were actually captured
by other photographers?
Brady began his professional photography career in New York while
working as a department store clerk. He studied photography and
honed his skills in his spare time, and by the mid-1850's he had
acquired a reputation as one of the country's finest portrait
photographers. Before long, everybody who was anybody wanted their
portrait taken by Mathew Brady.
Just as his personal popularity and status as one of the nation's
premier portrait photographers was at its peak, Brady
decided to shift gears and move into an entirely new realm of
photography - he wanted to document the Civil War in photographs -
and on a
grand scale!
Realizing that the battlefields of the day were very large,
dangerous and confusing, he knew that the only way to successfully
complete such an enormous project was to hire a team of
photographers to fan out across the entire theatre of the war and
take hundreds of pictures simultaneously. He himself would serve as
sort of a "project manager", dispatching his crew to various
locations in an effort to capture as much of the action as possible.
In 1862, he was roundly criticized for publicly displaying photos of
battlefield corpses at Antietam. By the end of the war, Brady and
his corps of photographers had captured some of the most intriguing
and disturbing images the world had ever seen, but the American
people had grown weary of all things war-related and they simply
wanted to get on with the task of rebuilding their lives and their
country. Brady found no market whatsoever for his pictures, and since
he had risked his own personal fortune on the huge project, he
ended up in bankruptcy and saddled with financial difficulties.
Even though Brady's grand goal of bringing images of the Civil War
to the masses of the day was unsuccessful by every account, he and
his photographers managed to create a brand new branch of
photography - wartime photojournalism. Today, his once-shocking
Civil War photographs help bring that sad time in our nation's history to life for
school children and adults alike, and they remind us that war is
indeed
hell - even when the combatants are fighting against their
fathers, brothers, cousins and friends.
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