Mathew B. Brady: America's First Great Photographer

Celebrated American photographer Mathew B. Brady was not the first war photographer - Roger Fenton's Crimean material predated the American Civil War - but it was the scale of his operation that earned him his place in history. He spent over$100,000 and created 10,000 prints, taking his photographic studio right onto the battlefields - so much so that his first popular photographs of the conflict at the First Battle of Bull Run, saw him so close to the action that he only just avoided being captured. The results of his and his many assistants? undertaking was staggering. For the first time Americans saw the reality of a major war.The exhibition of photographs from the Battle of Antietam in his New York gallery in 1862 entitled, ""The Dead of Antietam"" included many images of corpses and shocked the public.The result was bad news for Brady; postwar he received a derisory sum towards his expenses from the government and died penniless.Today we can judge the quality of his pre-war portraits and wartime photography and see him for what he was - a great photographer.Youngblood, Wayne is the author of 'Mathew B. Brady: America's First Great Photographer', published 2009 under ISBN 9781906347048 and ISBN 1906347042.