Civil War for the day

Dwight Garner has a review in The New York Times of Robert Wilson's book (photo, above) on Mathew Brady:

Salman Rushdie, in his novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet, described what we see in a photograph as “a moral decision taken in one-eighth of a second”. In the early days of photography, those moral decisions took longer to process. When Mathew Brady, the Civil War-era photographer (photo, below), took a portrait, the shutter remained open for ten to fifteen seconds or more, long enough for a bit of wind, or the hint of a smile, to ruin everything. His subjects often had their heads stabilized by an unseen vise.
Brady (1823-96) was America’s first great portrait photographer, Richard Avedon and Annie Leibovitz rolled into one. Those long exposure times were a gift of sorts to a country that was still young. What Brady’s images lacked in spontaneity they more than made up for in gravitas. He defined a nation’s dignified visual sensibility.
Mathew Brady: Portraits of a Nation is a new biography from Robert Wilson, the editor of The American Scholar. It’s a compact, straightforward, unblinking volume that has some of the attributes of its subject.
If I sometimes wanted more expressiveness from it— if I wished it were a literary document as well as an historical one— well, you can’t have everything. The book is sober history, a flinty chunk of Americana.
Almost no one smiled in Brady’s photographs. Smiles are elusive, too hard then to bottle. One of the things Wilson makes plain about Brady, however, is that he himself had a terrific smile. In his presence, one observer said, you felt “the light of an Irish shower sun.”
Brady’s personal charm helped make him the favorite of presidents, generals, celebrities, and royalty. He photographed Lincoln, Grant, and Lee, as well as Twain and Whitman and Dolley Madison and Daniel Webster. In the 1840s and 1850s, he set up a large gallery in downtown Manhattan. He was Brady of Broadway.
Not a lot is known about his early life. Brady was raised in upstate New York, near Lake George. His father was an Irish immigrant. Brady made it to Manhattan about the time the daguerreotype did. He manufactured leather cases for photographic equipment before going into the photography business himself. He opened his first studio in 1844.
Anyone who has seen Ken Burns’ documentary The Civil War knows how beautifully he learned to pan across Brady’s photographs from that war, among the first in history to leave a detailed photographic record. The details of Brady’s war years are both funny and revealing about the age.
He accompanied the Union Army to its first major battle, at Bull Run, and the experience scared him to death. He’d apparently shown up wearing a white linen duster, a straw hat and a gold watch fob. “Did he have any idea what war was like?” Wilson asks. “If so, why did he dress for it like a French landscape painter?”
Brady lost his Bull Run images in the tumult and rarely went near a battlefield again. He sent teams of photographers to the war’s fronts instead. He ran something like an early version of the Magnum agency.
There’s been abiding controversy about who actually took many of the photographs attributed to Brady. Wilson wades through these issues patiently, almost photo by photo. He mostly comes to his subject’s defense. “The idea that Brady stifled his photographers, or took undue credit for work that was theirs— undue by the standards of their day, not ours— is based on supposition and not evidence, and seems wrongheaded,” Wilson comments. “Brady allowed his photographers not only to freelance for the Army while working for him, but also to copyright the photographs they took while in his employ.”
Brady’s biggest photographic accomplishment may have been the familiar image he took of the defeated General Lee in Richmond shortly after the South had surrendered at Appomattox. “It was supposed that after his defeat it would be preposterous to ask him to sit,” Brady said later in an interview. “I thought that to be the right time for the historic picture.” Brady was right. “Who but Brady could have pulled off this photographic and journalistic coup?” Wilson asks. Among the reasons he could do so is that, because of his longtime interest in photographing military men, he’d known Lee since the Mexican War.
In the photographs, the author notes, the grizzled Lee “summons the strength of his unusual personal dignity for Brady’s camera, showing no trace of the humiliation of defeat but only a self-possessed seriousness. He gave the South a hero to cling to in those dark days after the war, and for decades to come”.
Brady’s career went slowly downhill after the war. There were bankruptcies. Some said he drank too much. Even late in life, however, as his health was failing, friends would report things like how “at the sight of me his face lit up with his characteristic winning smile.”
Brady’s early photographs of Lincoln had helped imprint the politician on the public mind. “Brady and the Cooper Institute made me president,” Lincoln supposedly said, referring to a speech he gave in the Great Hall at Cooper Union during the 1860 campaign.
When Lincoln received a request for a photograph, he responded by writing that while he was in New York, “I was taken to one of those places where they get up such things, and I suppose they got my shadow and can multiply copies indefinitely.”
Brady understood the history he was helping to make. As an advertisement for one of his portrait services once warned, accurately if heavy-handedly, “You cannot tell how soon it may be too late.”

 

Rico says the man was lucky in his timing, and brilliant in execution. We're lucky to have his photographs today...