- Born in 1822 in New York's Warren County, Mathew Brady moved to New York City when he was 16. There he started a business building jewelry cases while learning daguerrotype photography from such figures as inventor Samuel F.B. Morse.
- In 1844, Brady opened a gallery for his photography called Daguerrean Miniature Gallery in New York City, where he developed a reputation for photographing famous people, especially artists. In 1849, he opened a studio in Washington, D.C., in order to better capture the images of the leaders of the world. As he gained popularity--thanks to various awards, presidential photographs and work appearing in publications like Harper's Weekly--Brady was able to open more studios in Washington, D.C., and New York City.
- Brady's career was at its peak when he decided that the ongoing American Civil War needed to be documented. Despite his friends' warnings of potential risk to his well-being and finances, Brady organized photographers to accompany the troops into war and take pictures. Despite the group effort, the photographs were credited to Brady, whether or not he actually took them himself. While Brady did not take most of the pictures credited to him, he was not safe from danger, having risked death at Bull Run, Virginia, only to get lost for three days and nearly starve to death.
- After the Civil War, Americans grew weary of seeing the carnage that Mathew Brady and his photographers captured, and Brady soon went bankrupt. Congress bought the negatives of Brady's work for $25,000, but most of the money went toward paying off his debt.
At the end of his life, Brady lived in a rooming house in New York City, where he died in 1896, unknown and without a cent to his name. He was buried in Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C. - Mathew Brady is considered the first to use photography as a method of recording history. With his Civil War project, Brady became the first to show the true effects of war to the masses, especially those who had never been to war. The amount of photographic evidence of the Civil War made it a popular war to study, as the work of Brady and others provided much visual proof for future historians.
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