Brady is perhaps one of the most well-documented photographers of the 19th century, perhaps even in the world, so it’s not entirely clear why this volume was necessary. I’m not a Brady scholar, nor a scholar of 19th century American photography, but I don’t recall the author drawing the reader's attention to major findings, something he would surely do if he had something worth reporting. The Afterward speaks of the necessity for a “reliable biography,” so perhaps it was just a matter of compiling facts and ideas scattered here and there among numerous sources. If such is the case, then job well done on a readable account of an important figure in photographic and American history. Wilson sets out his subject’s relevance early on:
Enough is known about Brady’s life and work...to argue that he was the single most important person in nineteenth-century American photography. His Broadway portrait galleries in the 1840s and ’50s helped popularize photography in its early days and establish the photograph as a thing of value in itself. He helped make being photographed (at least by him and others with fancy studios) a mark of prestige. His efforts to collect portraits of every important American helped create a unifying sense of one American nation, a goal he pursued up until the very moment the Civil War blew it apart. His photographs of the famous, from the Prince of Wales to General Tom Thumb, helped invent the modern idea of celebrity, and his photograph of the presidential hopeful Abraham Lincoln on the day of his Cooper Union speech helped make Lincoln president.
I found the middle chapters on the Civil War less interesting. Wilson’s effort seems to be to track the movement of photographers across battlefields so as to establish proper credit for who might have created some of the war’s iconic images. This is a subject of continued investigation among historians, but doing so here takes the focus off Brady. Wilson is not entirely to blame as there seem to be few sources on Brady’s life at this time. There are no journals, diaries, or letters, and as the country was consumed by war, there was far less interest in the doings of Brady, despite his demonstrated ability for self-publicity.
The historical context is fleshed out with interesting detail. There is this informative description of the process of making daguerreotypes:
The process of daguerreotype involved several different sorts of skills, and its commercial application at the larger Broadway studios required numbers of workers so that the product could be finished while the customer waited. A typical daguerreotype studio of the time would have a well-appointed gallery and waiting room with a receptionist; elsewhere, young boys would clean and buff the metal plates, preparing them for exposure; the camera or cameras occupied an “operating room” or rooms at the top of the building. There the camera operator would actually take the picture. Still other workers would develop and fix the image on the plate (exposing themselves to deadly mercury fumes); artists might color or gild it; and finally others would mat and frame it, often in the sort of leather case Brady manufactured and sold. Brady’s studio was likely not this elaborate.
There are then, as now, incidents of new technology quickly replacing established tools and practices:
The shift from daguerreotypes to ambrotypes to paper prints happened with surprising speed. In 1853, daguerreotypes still dominated the market, especially in portraits. By 1856, a new publication called Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper used in its first year 123 illustrations copied from photographs. Of these, 100 were ambrotypes, 13 were daguerreotypes, and 10 were from photos on paper—“a good measure,” the historian of photography Robert Taft writes, “of the popularity that the ambrotype was enjoying in 1856.” He also counted 97 of the 123 as having been made by Brady, “which shows that Brady was the fashionable photographer of the day.” By 1857, of 128 photographs in Leslie’s that year, just over half were ambrotypes, 60 were from photos on paper, and 2 were daguerreotypes. By 1858 virtually all the photographic sources for illustration in the newspaper were paper prints.
The use of photoshop-like skills to enhance images was quite common and a means for one studio to distinguish its work from another:
Paper prints could rival painted portraits once they were enhanced by artists, who could color them with oils, crayons, or watercolors, and could improve the look of the sitter by subtly redrawing a jawline or covering up an imperfection. These doctored photographs thus both imbued photography with the portrait painter’s prerogative of flattering his patron and anticipated today’s use of Photoshop. By October 1857, Harper’s Weekly wrote of Brady’s life-size, oil-enhanced photographs, “The vocation of the portrait painter is not gone, but modified. Portrait painting by the old methods is as completely defunct as is navigation by the stars.” Depending on how elaborate the enhancement was and how skillful the artist, Brady could charge as much as $750 for an Imperial, which was almost certainly another reason for his enthusiasm for them.
Nathaniel Parker Willis, poet, journalist, author, and the founder and editor for three decades of the magazine Home Journal, provides a contemporary account of this process:
For the improvement of mechanism, by which so much larger a likeness can now be taken, Mr. Brady, I believe, is to have the credit; though I think the other secret of the matter—the knowing how sunbeam, pose and pencil, should be Brady’d together—shows more the perseverance of the man. He has employed thirty or forty artists to experiment upon this. The photograph, as you understand, is first taken by the machine, with artistic directions as to the choice of look and posture. A sitting of fifteen minutes is then given to an accomplished crayonist, who thus makes his memoranda for stippling the otherwise imperfect picture—supplying, with the pencil, that is to say, the life or expression left wanting by the photograph’s soul-omitting fidelity to mere matter, and removing the mechanical blemishes, such as the deep black with which the photograph copies light eyebrows, and similar defects in shading, which are easily corrected. To do this judiciously—to add life to the dead photograph without altering its type and truth—requires, of course, practical skill and the best judgment.
And finally, there is the amazing story of Alonzo Chappel’s 2.5 meter painting of President Lincoln’s death, The Last Hours of Abraham Lincoln (1868):
[John B. Bachelder, a painter and lithographer, conceived] a fictionalized representation of Lincoln’s deathbed scene, including in the picture everyone who had visited the wounded president in the last hours of his life, from the time he was moved across Tenth Street from Ford’s Theatre to the Petersen residence at No. 516, until he died there at 7:22 the next morning....Bachelder produced a sketch positioning everyone in this crowd and then asked Brady to photograph each person in the pose called for...Bachelder also made the initial contact with each of the sitters and scheduled them at Brady’s Pennsylvania Avenue studio, asking them to wear the same clothes they had worn when visiting the dying president. [Finally,] Bachelder picked Alonzo Chappel, a prolific painter of historical portraits and scenes, to execute the work.
The painting now resides in the Chicago History Museum, and much of Brady’s work with the US government, which purchased various lots over the years, often at the pleading and insistence of a financially strapped Mathew Brady.
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