Product Details
Hardcover
256 pages
The Lyons Press
Published 2000
From Library Journal
Unlike previous conflicts, when periodicals used artist sketches, the Civil War was the first major armed conflict to be illustrated with photographs. At the outset of the war in July 1861, Mathew Brady (1823-96), who was operating a photography studio in New York, set out to photograph the Battle of Bull Run in Manassas, VA. Brady went on to become the leading war photographer, amassing, with his assistants, some 6000 photographs. Lecturer and historian Garrison (The Amazing Civil War) has selected more than 300 of these images to be reproduced as vivid, large-size images for his book. The subject matter is diverse: portraits of political leaders and military commanders; and scenes of soldiers and carnage on the battlefield, care of the sick and wounded, and behind-the-lines home life. The emphasis is almost wholly on the Union side. This book will appeal to Civil War buffs. Recommended for academic libraries.DHarry Frumerman, formerly with Hunter Coll., New York
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
When Matthew Brady accompanied the Union army to Bull Run in July 1861, that first major Civil War battle also launched the remarkable career of Brady, who took the relatively new medium of photography to a higher level of terrible artistry during the next four years of slaughter. Garrison, a former college president and a Civil War scholar, has compiled more than 300 of the photographs taken by Brady and his assistants. Many of them, particularly the portraits of icons such as Lincoln and... read more
Book Description
"A spirit in my feet said ‘Go,' and I went."--Matthew B. Brady
In the Civil War era, Matthew Brady and his staff became the country's foremost photographers of battle scenes and military life, traveling widely throughout the warring states with their cameras. Brady, who learned the rudiments of photography from Samuel Morse (the inventor of Morse code), had established his own daguerreotype studio in New York in 1844.
By the time of the war, however, Brady was suffering from extremely poor eyesight, so many of the photographs credited to him from this time were in fact taken by his staff. Nonetheless, he amassed a priceless archive of images of the war¾some 6,000 of them¾with subjects as diverse as politicians, military leaders, and soldiers in the field, as well as devastating scenes of carnage and destruction taken shortly after the battles, and portraits of home life during the war.
BRADY'S CIVIL WAR is, in many ways, the complete realization of Brady's dream of bringing his photographs to the world at large, as it not only offers more than 300 stunning Civil War photographs but also sets the record straight as to the authorship of the photographs, finally dispelling the questions and myths that have shrouded his legacy for more than a century. |
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