Have you ever heard of the saying "a picture is worth a thousand words"? This saying is the theory behind the idea of photojournalism. Photojournalism is a form of journalism that uses images to tell a news story. It helps us humans sympathize and better connect with the story that we're hearing. Pictures give humans a chance to convey some parts of reality. It tells a story without even saying anything. Images to some people can be more powerful than words and it also provides us with more solid evidence of the occurrence of events.
We have this amazing phenomenon thanks to a man named Matthew Brady. Mathew Brady is often referred to as the father of photojournalism and he is well known for his photographs of the Civil War. He was arguably the most famous 19th-century American photographer. His photographs had a tremendous impact on society at the time of the war and still are today. He is usually synonymous with civil war photography. Before the civil war, in 1844, he established a studio in New York. By 1860, he was one of the foremost portrait photographers and was the primary source of pictures for leaders. When the Civil War broke out, with his own money, Brady organized a group of photographers and employees to follow the troops as field photographers. They photographed many images of the Civil War including the First Battle of Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg. The Civil War came to be the first major war that was ever recorded by the camera.
In 1862, Brady displayed the first photographs of the war in his New York Studio in an exhibit called "The Dead of Antietam." These were the first pictures of a battlefield before the dead were removed and were the first to be distributed to the public. His pictures brought the scale and pain of the war to the country. His team and him "brought home the terrible reality and earnestness of war". When the pictures were shown, people would look at them in awe. It was the first time the Americans had seen their OWN dead. People hoped to recognize their family and it was horrific and it was the real first-time people saw the real horrors and how bloody the war was.
By the end of the war, Brady had accumulated humongous debts. He had thought the pictures would cell, but the cost of the photographs bankrupted him. In order to pay for his debt, Brady's work was sold to the US government in 1875 for $25,000.Why did Matthew do this? He spent all this money and even going into debt. Matthew said, “a spirit in my feet said ‘Go’, and I went”. He was driven even though he knew it might not have been the best business wise choice. After the war, Brady's popularity had declined, so he continued studio portraits on a small scale. Eventually, he dies poor and underappreciated in 1896. However, Americans soon realized that he was one of the first to really understand photography as an art. He was a man with a vision and was out front and nobody NOBODY could outdo him for that era.
Here are some of his most famous pictures:
Portraits
Portrait of Lincoln
Portrait of General A. Custer
Civil War Photos
Civil War Photos
It's nice to see a blog with some photos.
ReplyDeleteIt is certainly interesting to learn about Matthew Brady and his amazing photos which survived through the war. However, I think it would be even more interesting to discuss about his impacts on the war itself and the culture at that time.
ReplyDeleteBefore Matthew Brady's photography, artists have depicted various events in dramatic formats. This was partially due to the prominence of Romanticism during the time. Even though the concept of realism was on the rise, Romanticism ultimately reigned as the standard format taught in art universities. What Matthew had done was incredibly revolutionary in the sense that his work was a combination of journalism and realism, two genres that were thought of as the most modern and advanced artistic concepts during that time.
The popularity of his work therefore introduced a new era in the United States. Many photographers and journalists followed his footsteps to document the American expansion to the West, which allowed those traveling to the west to be more aware of its conditions, undermining the great migration to the West and even, to some degree, created a demographic balance between the East and the West.
I would not call Matthew Brady as a photojouranlist, but an artist, a pioneer, and a revolutionary.
It is interesting that this is the first time that American's were really able to understand the the horrors of war. It is cool that photographs were able to communicate messages about war that could not previously be communicated. It is also impressive that Mathew Brady pursued such as risky career and was able to have such an impact on society even though many of his pictures didn't sell.
ReplyDeleteI thought that this was a very interesting and original post. I enjoyed learning about the origins of photojournalism, a piece of history that we did not cover in class!
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