Mathew Brady and the Image of History

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Much of our image of the Civil War era comes from the photographs of Matthew Brady, and in Matthew Brady and the Image of History Mary Panzer, curator of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D. C., examines the work of this American icon. Brady, she writes, "used art to forge a relationship between photography and history, but when the memory of Brady the artist vanished, we came to accept his images as facts." Brady composed his photographs along classical models, always seeking the heroic in his subjects--who, until the advent of the Civil War, tended to be the business and social leaders who could afford his fees. Panzer's account of Brady's wartime work is especially revealing: where assistants like Timothy O'Sullivan and Alexander Gardner favored realistic studies of the dead in battle, Brady favored sweeping panoramas that obscured individual soldiers. For all that, it is Brady we remember as the man who, a contemporary journalist observed, "has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war." The book is richly illustrated with the work of Brady and his carefully credited assistants, and it deserves a place in the library of anyone with an interest in 19th-century American history.

New York Times Book Review
Opens a new chapter in thinking about the portrayal of American life of the last century.

Washington Post
Depicts Brady's huge range of work [and]...his ambitious quest to create a kind of visual history of America.

Vicki Goldberg, author of American Photography: A Century of Images
Panzer's thoughtful, occasionally elegiac book brings up many issues involved in the recording and manufacture of history through images.

Book Description
Collected images from one of the greatest photographers of the nineteenth century. During a career that spanned the 1840s to the 1890s, Mathew Brady consciously set out to capture the pivotal moments of the second half of the nineteenth century. Here are his famous portraits of President Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Jefferson Davis, the Union dead, and Robert E. Lee. 72 b/w photographs, 79 b/w illustrations.

About the Author
Mary Panzer teaches at Hunter College and New York University and writes on photography and American history. She lives in New York City.


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Modern memory of the Civil War owes much to the lens of Matthew Brady, one of the most famous and paradoxical figures in American photography. The best of Mathew Brady's brilliant work is here, including his famous portraits of President Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Jefferson Davis, the Union dead, and Robert E. Lee -- haunting images that strove to create the vision of a stable, purposeful republic even as national identity was fragmenting.


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