Mathew Brady by Robert Wilson

Author:Robert Wilson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-08-27T21:00:00+00:00

A Confederate colonel’s horse, killed at Antietam (September 1862). Photograph by Alexander Gardner. Library of Congress

The Times reporter begins his piece somewhat melodramatically, calling up the list of the dead that “We see … in the morning paper at breakfast, but dismiss its recollection with the coffee.” But, he reminds his readers, each name “represents a bleeding mangled corpse … that will crash into some brain—a dull, dead, remorseless weight that will fall upon some heart, straining it to breaking.” The Times article goes on to praise Brady for having “done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it.” Holmes writes that “the honest sunshine”—meaning the camera itself—“gives us … some conception of what a repulsive, brutal, sickening, hideous thing it is, this dashing together of two frantic mobs to which we give the name armies.”

Both these writers, then, think first of the personal tragedy each of these bodies represents to the widening circle of relatives and friends who will grieve over each death. Then they turn to the broader social impact of the photographs, the effect they would have on strangers to the dead, whose own loved ones might or might not be at risk of a similar end, but who as citizens bore some of the collective responsibility for what the war did to those who fought it.

The crowds of people visiting the Brady studio on Broadway during the third week in October suggest the impact these photographs had on those who saw them. One advantage of having a gallery located in a good spot along one of the most vibrant avenues in the world was that so many passersby could see the small placard on the door with the electrifying announcement on it, or simply be drawn by those already crowding in. The Times writer would have you believe that this is how he himself stumbled upon the story, but Brady was adept at getting stories about his gallery in the New York newspapers. Interest might also have been driven by eight woodcut engravings made from the Antietam photographs that appeared in a two-page spread in the October 18 issue of Harper’s Weekly over the caption “Scenes on the Battlefield of Antietam.—From Photographs By Mr. M. B. Brady.” The attribution strongly suggests that Brady himself placed these images. Five of the eight engravings included the bodies of dead soldiers. The illustrated newspaper was published and circulated in New York, so its readers could easily have gone to the gallery to see the photographs, which in their 3-D format would have had a far greater emotional effect than the woodcuts in the paper.18

Every newspaper and magazine in the nation was covering the Antietam battle and its aftermath, but with the exception of the Times article (which appeared on page five of the newspaper), the small notice there that preceded it,

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