Mathew Brady and the Image of History. - book reviews

By Mary Panzer with an essay by means of Jeana K. Foley Smithsonian Institution Pres 1997 232 pp/$5000 (hb)

PATRICIA JOHNSTON and JOANNE LUKITSH

Mathew Brady is single of the best known names in nineteenth-century American photography, on the other hand his career is not simple to categorize. His name is no longer synonymous with Civil War photography, as the "Photos by the agency of Brady" pictures distributed by his studio have been reattributed to other photographers. And Brady's portrait photographs do not demonstrate the formal innovation of Nadar or Julia Margaret Cameron. The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC has organized a major exhibition of Brady's work that addresses the breadth of his career, focusing upon his portrait photography of cultural and political elites in antebellum America. The handsome touring exhibition prosperously integrates daguerreotypes, imperial salted paper prints, cartes-de-visite, stereographs, paintings, graphic arts, camera equipment and account works in a vivid demonstration of the range of material affected by means of Brady's practice.

At both the Smithsonian and the Fogg (the sum of two units venues where we saw the show) the installation lent a preciousness to each particular displayed; but rather than reinforcing a hierarchy with painting at the highest point and newspaper illustrations at the bottom, the installation nears the rich possibilities for display and interpretation of visual tillage The diversity and interrelationship of media is explored to not away the effects on a belonging to all subject: for example, the exhibition not absents a daguerreotype, lithograph and imperial salted-paper print of Daniel Webster, all derived from individual sitting at Brady's studio on the other hand intended for different distributions. In another following the painting by Alonzo Chappel, Last Hours of Lincoln, is exhibited nearest to the Brady photographs that serv as studies for the painter and a later small printed reproduction of the painting. over the exhibition the sequencing of diverse media representing related themes is an effective strategy for examining Brady's impact upon American visual culture.

In the extensively illustrated catalog, curator Mary Panzer details the few known facts of Brady's biography, emphasizing his exhibition of three studios on Broadway in fresh York City between 1844 and 1860 each in a more prestigious neighborhood than the previous individual She gives an account of fresh York City as a "visual kaleidoscope" - a center of emerging modernity - describing its traffic and noise as well as its expanding economy marked through the display of consumer usefuls in new retail establishments. Panzer locates the pioneering daguerreotypists within the processe of production and marketing, and she carefully details the professionalization of photography, situating it at the intersection of the emerging see the verb of the mass media, the fresh middle class and the city's advent as the leading urban center in America.

Panzer's speculative essay frames Brady's photographic career in metes that depart from the conventional historical understanding of Brady as documentary chronicler of the Civil War. (His character is so much a part of photographic fictitious story that when Edward Steichen went not on to war in 1917, he said, "I wanted to be a photographic reporter, as Mathew Brady had been in the Civil War."(1) While popular and photographic consciousness of Brady has largely been as "Mr Lincoln's Cameraman," as Roy Meredith titled his 1946 monograph upon the photographer, in recent years specialists including Alan Trachtenberg and Barbara McCandless have reevaluated Brady's photographs and placed greater emphasis upon his role as portrait maker and gallery impresario.(2) Panzer builds on this scholarship and a substantial section of the catalog engages Brady's photography with a certain quantity of of the most significant debates in the inquiry of nineteenth-century American photography. Closely examined are the portrait photograph's relationship with more traditional art forms; the character of Brady's portraits in forging a national identity before the Civil War; and the impact of modernity that ultimately l to the decline of Brady's studio.

Panzer focuses a large part of her essay upon untangling the nineteenth-century view of the thorny relationship between photography and the other arts. To this well-established debate she brings novel information and insight. She documents Brady's insistence upon viewing his portraits as art, as evidenced in an 1855 ad for his photographic services that he placed in The Crayon. Panzer argues that although Brady was a businessman who alone operated the camera during the earliest years of his career, this fact did not matter to his clients, who still believed they were getting Brady-quality photographs. He place his style on the Brady Studio pictures end his selection and training of his operators, who lay opened a distinctive studio style of artificial positions expression, lighting and composition. The presentation of Brady's photographs of notables in his gallery reinforced this presumption of art. Brady exhibited his daguerreotypes and imperial salted-paper prints nearest to oils, sculpture and fine prints. Other evidence of his viewpoint is more circumstantial: Panzer documents that Brady mov in novel York City's academic art circles and his studio took portraits of many of the leading artists. She cites an 1855 letter that the photographer wrote to Samuel F B Morse offering his views upon the value of the daguerreotype to the "kindred arts of painting, drawing, and engraving" and the daguerreotype's value for making artistic form more accessible to the public.