About Me

My photo
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
"To take a photograph is to align the head, the eye and the heart. It's a way of life." ~ Henri Cartier-Bresson

Thursday, May 26, 2011

Mathew Brady ~The father of Photojournalism,

Mathew Brady was born in New York State and is considered the father of photojournalism. He was not only the greatest American photo-historian of the 19th century, but also Abraham Lincoln's favourite photographer. Nobody in the history of photography could claim to have taken more photographs of important historical personalities during the 19th century than Mathew Brady.

Mathew Brady was the first photographer to document the American Civil War. This was his main focus as he wanted to convey to the American public and government the horrors of war and appealed for peace via his images


Abraham Lincoln, 1864.


Poet Walt Whitman
Poet Walt Whitman

 General Edwin H. Stoughton,

Daguerreotype portrait of Tennessee politician Neill Smith Brown, 1849

Glass collodion wet plate of Sioux and Arrapahoe Indian Delegation. 
Download an 86MB Tif here

 
The four condemned conspirators in the Lincoln Assassination await death on the gallows.  July 7, 1865. Library of Congress Collection


Battle of Gettysburg


I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all
oppression and shame;
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with
themselves, remorseful after deeds done.
~ Walt Whitman

Towards the end of his life,
Brady said of his photographs,
"No one will ever know what they cost me.
Some of them almost cost me my life."


2 comments: