Mathew Brady

Mathew Brady became famous through portraits of major American figures and was widely regarded as the leading portrait photographer in the United States^*1. At the outbreak of the Civil War, he invested his own fortune in the belief that war had to be photographed, organizing a large team of operators and sending them into the field with mobile darkrooms. Images associated with Brady's studio, including those made by Alexander Gardner and Timothy O'Sullivan, brought the reality of war to the public with unprecedented force^*2. When photographs of the dead at Antietam were shown in his New York gallery in 1862, viewers confronted battlefield corpses in a new and shocking way^*1. Brady later went bankrupt and died in poverty, which shows both the cultural power and the financial fragility of early war photography^*2.