Mathew B. Brady

Mathew B. Brady (1822-1896)
        As most people know that Mathew Brady was very famous in Civil War which was the most cruel, most brutal, and most painful one in American history. He was born in Warren County, New York ,and he was the father of photojournalism. Also, he was not only the greatest American photo-historian of the 19th century, but also Abraham Lincoln's favorite photographer. In other words,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 people that dare to be engaged in taking photographs of the American Civil War. Mathew Brady ‘s mainly photographs was almost focused on Civil War. He took lots of photos about Civil War because he wanted to try his best to tell people and government the poor phenomenon of the Civil War ,and wars were cruel ,and also he wanted to appealed to peace at the same time. A Film maker--Ken Burns who is famous for his television series "The Civil War" (1990), said his Civil War series could not have been made if it were not for Mathew Brady's photographs.Therefore,Mathew Brady made a big contribution about revealing the terrible war. Most things can be showed from his photographs.Such as the photos below:







         That's impossible that Mathew Brady just took Civil War photographs , he also took lots of other photographs such as travelling photos , life photos . These photos also can showing the truth of different people's lives . More of a project manager, he spent most of his time supervising his corps of traveling photographers, preserving their negatives and buying others from private photographers freshly returned from the battlefield, so that his collection would be as comprehensive as possible. When photographs from his collection were published, whether printed by Brady or adapted as engravings in publications, they were credited "Photograph by Brady," although they were actually the work of many people. Therefore,Mathew Brady had an important impression on people not only the people in early years but also now people.

         Mathew Brady was devoted his life into photographs. He expressed his feeing ,his idea ,his belief thorough his photopgraphs. What was worse, Mathew Brady lived the last few months of his life in a rooming house with alone, sick, and destitute. At that time,he was left penniless and unappreciated even though he used his whole life to preserving and perpetuating the history of his country. Towards the end of Brady's life, he left the last words : "No one will ever know what they cost me; some of them almost cost me my life."


The resources related :
1. http://s3.hubimg.com/u/221298_f260.jpg
2. http://www.old-picture.com/mathew-brady-studio/pictures/Mathew-Brady.jpg
3. http://storage.canoe.ca/v1/blogs-prod-static/mediam/antietam_dead_bury.jpg
4. http://rs6.loc.gov/ammem/cwphtml/cwbrady.html
5.http://www.photo-seminars.com/Fame/mathew.htm
6.http://www.mathewbrady.com/about.htm