Brady's Civil War: A Collection Of Memorable Civil War Images Photographed By Matthew Brady And His Assistants

When, late in 1862, Mathew B. Brady posted a notice on the door of his New York studio reading, "The Dead of their," it caused a sensation. It proclaimed an exhibition of photographs taken by him and his assistants of the aftermath of the bloodiest day in American history. It was the first time that most people witnessed the carnage of the American Civil War, bringing home to them the terrible reality and earnestness of the conflict.

In fact, the Civil War was the first to be covered in detail in photographs, and literally thousands of them were taken by Brady and his operatives working out of New York and Washington, D.C. Before the war, photography itself was still in its infancy, but Brady forged a name for himself as a portrait photographer, choosing as his subjects the country's civilian and military leaders, and foreign dignitaries, and chronicling the nation's history as painters had done before him. As war loomed, Brady planned to document the war on a grand scale and organized a corps of photographers to follow the troops in the field. Spurning the advice of friends who warned him of the battlefield dangers and financial risks, Brady proved with his war scenes that photographs could be more than posed portraits. He established the craft as an art form, such that photographs credited to his studios have inspired countless photographers ever since.

Brady Studio teams carried their cameras and darkroom equipment in horse-drawn carts around the camps and the battlefields, recording for posterity the commanders and troopers, the weapons, the pageantry, the triumphs and the suffering of the sick and the wounded, and, sadly, the death and sheer destruction in the cities andcornfields during the war that pit American against American.

For Brady himself, the war proved a financial disaster, and even the sale of his archive some years later could not save him from bankruptcy. In his final years, he said, "No one will ever know what I went through to secure those negatives." He died in 1896, penniless and largely unappreciated. It was not until decades later that his skill and artistry with the camera were acknowledged.

Fortunately, many of his images survive, and Brady's Civil War presents a selected collection of them, highlighting their immense creativity and informative value for military enthusiasts as well as readers interested in the art of photography. The text, by Webb Garrison, a successful author on the wide subject of the Civil War, is in the form of incisive and explanatory captions, describing how the camera was taken to the battlefield to create the world's first comprehensive photo-documentation of war.

What Edward S. Curtis did for the American West, Mathew Brady did for the Civil War, and a half century earlier. Brady was the first to induce subjects to pose for his camera and was already famous by 1850--he photographed nineteen presidents of the United States. But when the Civil War began, Brady changed direction, left his studio, and joined the rough-and-ready camps of soldiers, recording the entire event with the help of several assistants. He spent a fortune on this endeavor and, with the postwar economic recession, he went bankrupt. He died alone and destitute in 1896 but, thanks to Brady, we have thousands of images of mid-nineteenth-century camp life, military drills, and moments just before and after battles (early technology required stillness for the camera shutter and preempted action photos at the time). This photographic work of art has been reedited and has a new introduction by historian Alan Axelrod.