From the Back Cover:
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 were in fact taken by his staff. Nonetheless, he amassed a priceless archive of images of the war-some six thousand of them-with 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: It not only offers more than three hundred 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.
From the Inside Flap:
Photographer Mathew Brady was already famous by 1850; in his lifetime he captured eighteen U.S. presidents on film. But when the Civil War began, Brady left his studio and joined the rough-and-ready camps of soldiers, recording the entire war with the help of several assistants. He went bankrupt in the process and died alone and destitute in 1896. But, thanks to Brady, those thousands of images of camp life, military drills, and moments just before and after battles are forever part of our flickering consciousness of that calamitous conflict. A century-and-a-half after that war, Brady’s Civil War brings alive hundreds of those stunning Civil War moments, highlighting the photos’ immense creativity and informative value for military enthusiasts as well as readers interested in the art of photography. The text by Webb Garrison is incisive and explanatory, describing how the camera was taken to the battlefield to create the world’s first comprehensive photo-documentation of war. This edition, with an introduction by historian Alan Axelrod, is a fitting tribute to the Civil War on the occasion of its 150th anniversary.
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