Mathew Bradys Photography of the Civil War Essay

Introduction Photography opened the world’s view. â€Å"Until 1839 the world was blind. Vision was limited to the immediate spectator or the art of the artist, but the rest of the world and history could not see† (Horan 3). People imagine things and do not believe it until they see it. Unless someone has really seen it they believe what they want. Mathew Brady showed people what war was really like. Before Mathew Brady’s pictures people thought that war was an adventure and fighting was honorable but they never knew what it was like. War was extremely violent and people did not realize this except the ones who had experienced it. When they saw the pictures of the war most people were appalled. â€Å"Mr. Brady has done something to bring home†¦show more content†¦Before the War Mathew Brady was born in the year 1822 in Warren County, New York. His parents were Irish Immigrants named Andrew and Julia Brady. Little is known about his early life. Bef ore his photography career he was a department store clerk and later opened his own small business manufacturing jewelry cases. He was on his way to Albany for reasons unknown when he met William Page, a painter, who introduced him to Samuel Morse. It was Samuel Morse who taught him how to take daguerreotypes, a type of photography in which you create a mirror image on a silver-surfaced copper plate. After he had mastered daguerreotypes he opened his own miniature gallery to show off his photographs. It was a successful gallery. He had won medals every year from 1844-1850. He had also begun photographing famous Americans, for example Edgar Allen Poe and James Cooper. Mathew Brady had very poor eyesight â€Å"but the role of the portrait photographer was to create the image that the camera would capture, and thus his failing eyesight was not a significant disability, and nobody found it odd that New York’s most famous photographer saw so poorly or that he protected his se nsitive eyes with blue-tinted glasses†¦There was a clear distinction between the artist-photographer creating an image and the photographic operator who merely handled and processes the plate† (Armstrong 5). Even though his eyesightShow MoreRelatedMathew Brady: The Father of Photojournalism Essay869 Words   |  4 PagesBorn of Irish immigrants in 1823 in a little place called Warren County, New York; Mathew Brady is known as â€Å"The Father of Photojournalism.† While a student of Samuel Morse and a friend of Louis Daguerre (inventor of the â€Å"Daguerreotype,† a method of photography that the image is developed straight onto a metal coated surface), in which he had met while under the study of Morse, Brady took up his interest in photography in the year of 1839, while only seventeen years of age. Brady took what he had learnedRead MoreHow Photography Affects The Social And Political Arena1123 Words   |  5 PagesPhotography had been around more than 2 0 years before the Civil War began. When pictures were taken, they showed colonels, bodies that were on the battlefield, even soldiers that were around the camp tent. A few photographers that will be discussed are Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, George Barnard and Timothy O’Sullivan. I will talk about how their photography affected the social and political arena as well as how photography in contemporary society provides the public with an up-close testimony