Mathew Brady and the Image of History.

By Mary Panzer with an essay by Jeana K. Foley Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997 232 pp./$50.00 (hb).

PATRICIA JOHNSTON and JOANNE LUKITSH

Mathew Brady is one of the best known names in nineteenth-century American photography, but his career is not simple to categorize. His name is no longer synonymous with Civil War photography, as the "Photos by 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, D.C. has organized a major exhibition of Brady's work that addresses the breadth of his career, focusing on his portrait photography of cultural and political elites in antebellum America. The handsome touring exhibition successfully integrates daguerreotypes, imperial salted paper prints, cartes-de-visite, stereographs, paintings, graphic arts, camera equipment and account books in a vivid demonstration of the range of material affected by Brady's practice.

At both the Smithsonian and the Fogg (the two venues where we saw the show), the installation lent a preciousness to each object displayed; but rather than reinforcing a hierarchy with painting at the highest point and newspaper illustrations at the bottom, the installation presents the rich possibilities for display and interpretation of visual culture. The diversity and interrelationship of media is explored to present the effects on a common subject: for example, the exhibition presents a daguerreotype, lithograph and imperial salted-paper print of Daniel Webster, all derived from one sitting at Brady's studio but intended for different distributions. In another sequence, the painting by Alonzo Chappel, Last Hours of Lincoln, is exhibited next to the Brady photographs that served as studies for the painter and a later small printed reproduction of the painting. Throughout the exhibition the sequencing of diverse media representing related themes is an effective strategy for examining Brady's impact on American visual culture.

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

Panzer's thoughtful essay frames Brady's photographic career in terms that depart from the conventional historical understanding of Brady as documentary chronicler of the Civil War. (His role is so much a part of photographic legend that when Edward Steichen went off 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 on the photographer, in recent years specialists including Alan Trachtenberg and Barbara McCandless have reevaluated Brady's photographs and placed greater emphasis on his role as portrait maker and gallery impresario.(2) Panzer builds upon this scholarship and a substantial section of the catalog engages Brady's photography with some of the most significant debates in the study of nineteenth-century American photography. Closely examined are the portrait photograph's relationship with more traditional art forms; the role of Brady's portraits in forging a national identity before the Civil War; and the impact of modernity that ultimately led to the decline of Brady's studio.

Panzer focuses a large part of her essay on untangling the nineteenth-century view of the thorny relationship between photography and the other arts. To this well-established debate she brings fresh information and insight. She documents Brady's insistence on 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 only 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 put his style on the Brady Studio pictures through his selection and training of his operators, who developed a distinctive studio style of poses, 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 next to oils, sculpture and fine prints. Other evidence of his viewpoint is more circumstantial: Panzer documents that Brady moved in New York City's academic art circles and his studio took portraits of many of the leading artists. She quotes an 1855 letter that the photographer wrote to Samuel F. B. Morse offering his views on 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.

Brady's reputation has suffered in the late twentieth century not because photography's artistic status was contested, but because definitions of authorship changed. In the nineteenth century photographic authorship was defined more broadly, and Brady could claim ownership and thus artistic title to all the portraits and Civil War photographs marketed by his studio. Later historians, however, have worked to distinguish the respective images produced by Alexander Gardner, Timothy O'Sullivan, George Barnard and others, thus challenging Brady's claim to authorship. Panzer recounts fascinating examples of the interaction between artists. Painter Henry F. Darby, who worked for Brady's studio in the 1850s, made oil portraits of Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun based on Brady Studio daguerreotypes, but reversed the composition to correct the daguerreotype's mirror image. The paintings were prominently displayed at Brady's third gallery at the corner of Broadway and Tenth Street. Brady and Darby also collaborated on a posthumous portrait of Washington Irving. Brady's studio copied and enlarged a previously unknown daguerreotype of the author by John Plumbe into an imperial print. Darby then "enhanced" the image with oils. As Panzer points out, though Brady was credited with these images then, today we consider Darby the author of the portraits. This question of authorship is not sidestepped by the exhibition or the book, but rather is situated within current thinking on visuality as a cultural force.

Panzer connects Brady's portraiture to the emergence of an American national identity in the years before the Civil War, during which portraits were recognized as didactic images for a nation seeking its own history. With this assertion she extends Richard Rudisill's concept of the daguerreotype as a shaper of American identity, demonstrating how the photographically derived image permeates other aspects of visual culture and recognizing the complexities of how these images carry myths.(3) Panzer uses Brady's production of portraits of well-known Americans and their exhibition in his studio as an example of how portraiture served in this development of nationalism. By naming his collection the "National Portrait Gallery" Brady described his ambition, manifested by the images his studio took of all the senators and congressional representatives in the months preceding the Civil War, when the impending loss of unity made the images of the democratic leaders from diverse factions a hopeful sign of national unity.

The decline of Brady's studio and his difficulties in finding a permanent home for his archive resulted from the enormous cultural, and to some extent technological, shifts that occurred after the Civil War. Brady was a pre-modern man who lived into the next era. At the beginning of his career, few photographs were available to the public, and people thronged to Brady's galleries to see images of the men who were shaping the country: Webster, Zachary Taylor, James Buchanan, many of the Northern and Southern senators, and later Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln. Early on these men were aware of the value of the photograph as publicity and many valued their place in Brady's studio as much as Brady did. They were also aware that this place of honor had a long tradition in the earlier museums of painted portraits such as that organized by Charles Willson Peale. After the Civil War, however, portraits of notables were far from rare. Before the war Brady had sold the rights to his portraits for production by E. H. Anthony as cartes-de-visite, making them inexpensive and plentiful, and illustrated magazines became common in many homes.

The marketing of Brady's portraits as cartes-de-visite also changed the nature of the reception of his work: from beautifully retouched and often hand-colored salted-paper prints, best viewed on walls, and exhibited to great effect in Brady's fashionable gallery space on Broadway, to small, shiny cartes-de-visite, assembled in albums according to the preferences and interests of individual owners. Thus photographic prints lost much of their artistic cache.

But cultural changes were more significant for Brady's fate. Panzer argues that the culture that had struggled through the violence of the Civil War cast a more cynical and disillusioned eye on the heroes and values of the antebellum period - including Brady's artistic ambitions for his portraiture. After the war the characters and events from before it looked historical. What Brady had marketed as art before the Civil War, he now tried to market as history but with less success. In the end it is Brady's ambitions as an historian that transcends his work as an entrepreneur or artist.

NOTES

1. Edward Steichen, A Life in Photography, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963; reprint: New York: Bonanza Books, 1984). Chapter 5, n.p.

2. Roy Meredith, Mr. Lincoln's Camera Man, (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1946); Alan Trachtenberg, "Illustrious Americans," in Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989); Barbara McCandless, "The Portrait Studio and the Celebrity: Promoting the Art," in Martha A. Sandweiss, ed., Photography in Nineteenth-Century America, (Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum, 1991).

3. Richard Rudisill, Mirror Image: The Influence of the Daguerreotype on American Society, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1971).

PATRICIA JOHNSTON, Associate Professor of Art History at Salem State College is the author of Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen's Advertising Photography. JOANNE LUKITSH is Assistant Professor of Critical Studies at Massachusetts College of Art, where she teaches courses in modern art and history of photography.