Mathew Brady is best known for aggressively capturing a visual, historical record of the Civil War. But beyond his influence as a pioneer in photojournalism, Brady was also a popular brand unto himself, known as "Brady of Broadway." He created studio galleries in New York City and Washington, D.C., where he sought to photograph and display life-like portraits of every distinguished American living at the time.
"Photographing famous people was a passion as well as a business plan," writes Robert Wilson in Mathew Brady: Portraits of a Nation, detailing Brady's determination to improve esthetic form and technical processes, evolving with the medium as it matured. Brady photographed iconic studio portraits of notables like Abraham Lincoln, the Prince of Wales, Dolley Madison, Henry James and Edgar Allan Poe. He was also a shrewd self-promoter and entrepreneur who believed war could be good for business. Thus, Brady and his team of photographers recorded, for the government, more than 10,000 images of the Civil War--for which he was never paid. While Brady achieved artistic success, by the end of his life, he was bankrupt and impoverished.
Few records and artifacts exist pertaining to Brady's personal life, but Wilson offers an in-depth, thoroughly researched chronicle of a driven, hard-working, competitive man. Myths and misconceptions surrounding Brady's work and influence are dispelled, enhancing the idea that Brady elevated photography as a serious and valuable art form in and of itself. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines