Matthew brady gettysburg photos before battle

Whenever the term “war photographer” is mentioned, it’s impossible not to think of the indelible images of World War Two, the Spanish Civil War and the war in Vietnam.

Matthew brady gettysburg photos before battle

But if you want to find the godfather of the genre, you have to go back to the 19th century and the American Civil War, when Mathew Brady pioneered not just war photography, but photojournalism itself.

Brady and his team of photo apprentices traveled in the wake of, and sometimes were embedded with armies.

They captured the casualties and destruction of the bloodiest war in American history with a clinical, detached eye. Their photos became the greatest documentation of the war and can be seen where any mention of the war has accompanying photos – most famously in Ken Burns’ landmark documentary “The Civil War.”

Brady himself studied under Samuel Morse, the pioneer of the daguerreotype method in the United States.

In 1844 he opened his own studio o