Mathew Brady

Mathew B. Brady was an American photographer. Known as one of the earliest and most famous photographers in American history, he is best known for his scenes of the Civil War. He studied under inventor Samuel Morse, who pioneered the daguerreotype technique in America. Brady opened his own studio in New York City in 1844, and went on to photograph U.S. presidents John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Millard Fillmore and Martin Van Buren, among other public figures.

When the Civil War began, Brady's use of a mobile studio and darkroom enabled thousands of vivid battlefield photographs to bring home the reality of war to the public. He also photographed generals and politicians on both sides of the conflict, though most of these were taken by his assistants rather than by Brady himself.

After the end of the Civil War, these pictures went out of fashion, and the government did not purchase the master copies as he had anticipated. Brady's fortunes declined sharply, and he died in debt.

At the age of 16, Brady moved to Saratoga, New York, where he met portrait painter William Page and became Page's student. In 1839, the two traveled to Albany, and then to New York City, where Brady continued to study painting with Page and with Samuel Morse, Page's former teacher. Morse had met Louis Jacques Daguerre in France in 1839, and returned to the US to enthusiastically push the new daguerreotype invention of capturing images. At first, Brady's involvement was limited to manufacturing leather cases that held daguerreotypes. But soon he became the center of the New York artistic colony that wished to study photography. Morse opened a studio and offered classes; Brady was one of the first students.

In 1844, Brady opened his own photography studio at the corner of Broadway and Fulton Street in New York, and by 1845, he began to exhibit his portraits of famous Americans, including the likes of Senator Daniel Webster and writer Edgar Allan Poe. In 1849, he opened a studio at 625 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., where he met Juliet (whom everybody called 'Julia') Handy, whom he married in 1850 and lived with on Staten Island. 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 Civil War photography.

In 1850, Brady produced The Gallery of Illustrious Americans, a portrait collection of prominent contemporary figures. The album, which featured noteworthy images including the elderly Andrew Jackson at the Hermitage, was not financially rewarding but invited increased attention to Brady's work and artistry. In 1854, 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; thousands were created and sold in the United States and Europe.

In 1856, Brady placed an ad in the New York Herald offering to produce "photographs, ambrotypes and daguerreotypes." This inventive ad pioneered, in the US, the use of typeface and fonts that were distinct from the text of the publication and from that of other advertisements.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2024