Mathew B. Brady was born in
1823, the son of
Irish immigrants who had settled near
Saratoga Springs,
New York.
Brady was a celebrated photgraphic
portrait artist who contributed a number of technical and aesthetic enhancements to the photographer's art. While photography was still in its infancy, Brady sensed its emerging importance to the historian's work. After photographing a broad range of the most prominent
Americans, he went on to photograph the
Civil War. Although he has been accused of claiming more than his share of credit for some of these contributions, Brady is sometimes thought of as the century's most important
photographer and the man who invented
photojournalism.
He shot important portraits of
Abraham Lincoln,
Mark Twain,
Walt Whitman,
Edgar Allen Poe and other political and
cultural heroes who helped shape the
American identity;
Midgets,
Siamese twins and other human curiosities from
P.T. Barnum's "
Greatest Show on Earth"; Civil War generals
Lee and
Grant in regal uniforms;
the Union fleet and the
ironclad battleships Monitor and
Merrimack; vast fields littered with the corpses of men and horses under
grey skies in
the aftermath of battle. If our visual sense of that
era's passion and drama can be attributed to any one person, it would be Mathew Brady.