.

The photographs captured the depth of the bloody struggle, depicting corpses and injured soldiers. He died penniless.

Legacy

Today, however, Brady’s photographs are among the only visual tributes to the Civil War.

He took pictures of numerous generals and politicians, including Abraham Lincoln. He first took pictures during the First Battle of Bull Run, where he nearly got captured. Brady died in 1896 in New York City after being run over by a streetcar. While many photographic studios of the period attracted patrons by displaying portraits of the famous, Brady’s collection was indisputably the largest and most comprehensive.

His handsomely appointed galleries in New York and Washington attracted a steady stream of customers—from American Presidents to foreign dignitaries—who came to have their own portraits expertly made by one of Brady’s highly skilled operators and to view at their leisure the hundreds of photographs of prominent personalities that adorned Brady’s gallery walls.

Brady first sought permission from General Winfield Scott to cover the war but was turned down. Consequently, he lost his studio and fell into bankruptcy. The images were extremely influential and brought home the horrors of war to everyday Americans who otherwise would never know.

Spurned by the Government

Brady spent over $100,000 producing Civil War photographs, but to his dismay, the US government never purchased them.

Brady employed a team of 23 other photographers and gave them each a traveling darkroom. By 1850, he had become a well-known photographer and had already won numerous awards for his work, particularly photographs of famous people.

Bringing Home the Brutality of the Civil War

During the Civil War, Brady took numerous photographs of battlefields.

But beyond its use as a publicity tool, Mathew Brady’s distinguished collection served to manifest his own sense of historical mission as well. Initially, Brady’s studio produced cartes de visite of soldiers that could be sent home to family. Due to deteriorating eyesight, Brady seldom went to battlefields after Bull Run.

In 1862, he put on an exhibition in Washington that featured scenes from the Antietam Battlefields. Due most likely to his deteriorating eyesight, Brady spent most of his time in Washington DC, organizing his assistants and the nearly 10,000 photographs they submitted.

In order to do this, he hired 20 assistants including Alexander Gardner and Timothy H. O’Sullivan. He purchased wagons, dark rooms, cameras, tripods, glass plates and all of the chemicals needed to produce images in the field.