Think about this for a moment: postcards. What is a postcard? You take a vacation and pick up a little 3x5 or 4x6 photograph of the city you visited. And what do you do with it? Either save it for a collection or send it to someone. Lots of kids I know collect postcards, some of them from places they have never even been before. It's a popular hobby.

Now think about Mathew Brady. Who is he, you might ask? He was a famous Civil War photographer. I had to do a little research on the man, but as I got into reading about Mr. Brady, I found out some very interesting things! Just as a person might collect postcards from places they have never been, Mr. Brady was well known for photographs he didn't even take! Oh, he did take many, many photos, way back when photography was in its infancy. But he also had a staff of photographers to take some of them for him. You see, he had very poor eyesight, which was progressing to near blindness. So other men did some of the work for him, and yet Brady's name was on their work. "Photograph by Brady" became a trademark at the beginning of the photography industry.

Mathew Brady was a very interesting chap who was at the forefront of the use of photography. Born in upstate New York in either 1823 or 1824, of Irish descent, Brady may have become interested in art in his teens. While living in New York City, he heard of an exciting new invention in France. Samuel F.B. Morse, the inventor of telegraphy, used these famous words from the Bible which he chose as the first telegraphic message sent on May 24, 1844: "What hath God wrought?" I think they describe not only the power to communicate through the telegraph, but also the power of photography.

Morse was the one who introduced our country to the daguerreotype, which had just been unveiled across the sea. This was the beginning of photography! It has even been claimed that the daguerreotype made of Morse by Brady was the first one ever made in America; if not, then one of the earliest.

Brady grabbed the art form with gusto and endeavored to take photographs of every important person in the whole country! I can say that he had great success with that, as his first book contained 24 famous Americans' portraits. The Gallery of Illustrious Americans was published in 1850.

It was not quite as simple back then, as it is today, to take a proper portrait of a person. I can do that myself, with amazing results, an I am not a professional photographer. Back in 1839, it was a long, difficult process to reproduce an image. Copper plates were coated with silver, exposed to iodine vapors for an extended time, and only then the "camera" was aimed at he subject for several minutes, depending on the weather and temperature! Afterward, it was exposed to heated mercury vapors and developed. In the end, you still had a reverse image. The daguerreotype was named after its French inventor, Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre.

Brady studied at a school run by Morse and gained great knowledge and skill in the art of photography. In 1844 he opened his own studio. After the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839 and then the progression to the new "wet plate" process of photography, multiple copies of the subject could be reproduced. By the mid-1850s, people wanted life-size, or "Imperial", portraits. (Unfortunately, they showed every detail, or flaw, and many were touched up by artists.) Portraiture was an art that required great patience, knowledge, and an eye for detail. Many of Brady's sets were quite stylish, and his subjects were very distinguished, right down to the posing of their hands. But Brady's eyes were getting worse, and he had to have some help.

In 1856, Alexander Gardner joined up with Brady and took on a lot of the portrait work. Abraham Lincoln had his portrait taken by Brady a year before he became the sixteenth president of the United States. You have no doubt seen some of Brady's work and didn't even realize it. The image on the five dollar bill is an engraving from one of his photographs.

At this time in our history the Union was in great danger of breaking apart. Confederate troops fired on Union soldiers, and so the Civil War began. According to Mathew Brady, Civil War Photographer by Elizabeth Van Steenwyk, Brady had a very close friendship with Lincoln; so much so that Lincoln gave Brady the very chair that he had used in Congress. That chair became a signature of all Brady's photographs from his Washington studio.

President Lincoln gave him permission to chronicle the war, but there wouldn't be any financing. He created a studio on wheels, a covered wagon of sorts, and proceeded to do his work. Unfortunately the opportunity for photographing out in the "battlefields" didn't turn out exactly as he planned, and he had to regroup. Brady hired several assistants, and with their ungainly equipment and against all odds, they were eventually able to take thousands of pictures.

Cameras then were about the size of a microwave oven. In order to take photos in the field, the process included covering an eight-inch by ten-inch glass plate with a thin coat of light-sensitive chemicals. They had to have a good supply of those on hand and store them in dust-proof boxes. The coating was wetted and exposed, then had to dry and be immersed in silver nitrate. After the exposure, in which the subject had to be perfectly still for minutes to avoid ghost-like images or blurring, the process yielded a positive image. This process is called "wet collodion". To see an animation of this process, go to www.npg.si.edu/exh/brady/gallery/gallery.html and on the table of contents page, click on "Making a Photograph". You can also take a virtual tour of Brady's gallery!

What about a darkroom? Of course you needed a darkroom for this, and that was what they created, a darkroom on wheels. Can you imagine a canvas-covered darkroom in the middle of a war zone? It was an unwieldy, dangerous prospect. But it produced a record for us that is found today in the National Archives, Library of Congress, National Portrait Gallery, and of course private collections. The quality of the imagery is astonishing!

Brady himself is known for his calm, peaceful, dignified "portraiture" of the war: documenting officers, regiments, tents and artillery, prisoners, and even the wounded. But his associate, Alexander Gardner, and others took many bloody aftermath photos. Gardner was known for his attention to the hard facts of war: defeat, starvation, and death. Brady was all about the classic poses, the glory, the sometimes-synthetic view. His photographs showed the dignity of the officers in the midst of the dirt and dreariness of the enlisted men. Gardner showed the bodies strewn about and was even accused of posing them for effect. These were shocking in their day, but many people pored over them with a magnifying glass, looking for signs of lost loved ones.

Of course, there were very few "action" shots of battles due to the limitations of the involved process of the photography. One slight movement created a blur on the glass plate. But Mathew Brady and his associates have given us a glimpse into history that is kind of like a postcard. A moment (or two or three) in time, captured on a glass plate. With a click of the shutter, those who were frozen like statuary for the photographer were frozen in time for us. It was a real time with real people who died defending what they each believed in. And even though we were not there, we can thank Mathew Brady for his priceless collection of "postcards" from the Civil War.

Sources and Resources
Panzer, Mary. Mathew Brady and the Image of History. Smithsonian Institution, 1998.
Garrison, Webb. Brady's Civil War. Salamander Books Ltd., 2000.
Sullivan, George. Portraits of War: Civil War Photographers and Their Work. Twenty-First Century Books, 1998.
Mathew Brady's Illustrated History of the Civil War. Copyright 1912 by the War Memorial Assn., Fairfax Press.
Van Steenwyk, Elizabeth. Mathew Brady, Civil War Photographer. A First Book, 1997.

Activities
Make a pinhole camera: www.exploratorium.edu/science_explorer/pringles_pinhole.html Make an oatmeal box camera: users.rcn.com/stewoody/makecam.htm

Nancy Baetz is the mother of four lovely children that have been homeschooled since day one. She loves to help other families get started homeschooling and hosts newcomer encouragement meetings for the Colorado Springs Homeschool Support Group. She has been the Art and Photo acquisitions editor for TOS magazine and enjoys writing and photography.  She and her family live in beautiful Colorado Springs. She would love to hear from you at NancyBaetz@msn.com