Mathew Brady Essay

Mathew Brady is considered to be the father of photojournalism and is well known for his documentation of the Civil War. Brady won the highest award at the American Institute’s fair in 1844, 1845, 1846, 1849, and 1857, for his work called "The Daguerreian Miniature Gallery" where he showcased his cases for daguerreotypes, jewelry, and painted miniature portraits. During this time he began photographing well known Americans such as Edgar Allan Poe and James Fenimore Cooper. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Brady sought to create a photo-documentation of the war. At his own expense, he organized a group of photographers and staff to follow the troops as the first known field-photographers. Brady supervised the activities of the photographers,

Little is known about his early life. It is believed though that on his trip to Albany to cure his eye inflammation he met portrait painter William Page. William Page in turn introduced him to Samuel F.B. Morse. Morse, a professor of art, painting, and design at New York University. Through Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, Brady was tutored in the newly developed technology of daguerreotype, the process of creating a mirror image on a silver-surfaced copper plate. In 1862 Brady shocked the nation when he displayed the first photographs of the carnage of the war in his New York Studio in an exhibit entitled "The Dead of Antietam." These images, photographed by Alexander Gardner and James F. Gibson, were the first to picture a battlefield before the dead had been removed and the first to be distributed to a mass public. These images received more media attention at the time of the war than any other series of images during the rest of the war A New York Times article in October, 1862, illustrates the impression these images left upon American culture stating, "Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like