Mathew Brady, the Civil War photographer who died this week (Jan. 15) in 1896, is rightly considered the father of photojournalism, although there is controversy over how many Civil War photographs he actually took, and he was as much a marketing genius as he was a gifted photographer.
Like all 19th century photographers, Brady began as a portrait photographer because picture-taking technology back then necessitated long exposure times, which meant subjects had to stay still for long periods. But Brady became very successful, mostly due to an ingenious business plan in which he took portraits of celebrities for free — politicians, high-ranking military men, even stage actors — and then displayed those photos in his shop to attract paying customers.
And when the Civil War began, Brady had another brilliant idea. He ran an ad in a local newspaper warning the parents of the many young men eager to join the war, “You cannot tell how soon it may be too late.” He meant that, for memory’s sake, they better get their boy’s picture taken while he was still alive. Soon, at Brady’s studio in Washington, D.C., there were long lines of parents and sons waiting to have Brady take their picture. He charged a dollar a photograph and made a killing.
Once the war began, however, Brady decided he wanted to photographically document it, and at first he actually did visit battlegrounds — he was at the war’s opening pitched battle, the First Battle of Bull Run in Manassas, Va. — where he took photographs, mostly of dead soldiers (who, being dead, could stay still indefinitely). However, later in the war, perhaps because his eyesight was going bad, he dispatched teams of photographic assistants to capture the war, but because Brady considered all photographs taken by his assistants to be part of his corporate brand, every Civil War photograph was labeled, “Photo by Brady,” whether he actually took the shot or not. As a result, the nearly 10,000 photographs that Brady and his assistants took of the Civil War — which today can be found at the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and Civil War photographic exhibitions across the country — are all identified as “Photo by Brady.”
After the war, Brady, who had spent nearly $100,000 to create his thousands of photographic plates, expected the U.S. government to buy them, but when the government refused, he was forced into bankruptcy and died penniless in the charity ward of a New York hospital.
But his legacy remains and his images are, quite literally, still in wide circulation. His many photographs of President Lincoln — which he personally took — were the models for the five-dollar bill and the Lincoln penny that we use as currency today.
