Mathew Brady Images

Disunion: Lincoln Captured!

Photography was a fluid technique in 1861, in every sense. It had made rapid strides since the first inchoate smudges of a backyard in France were captured in 1826, the year that Jefferson and Adams died. (That first photo, locked in a vault in Texas, can be seen here .)

Improvements followed fast and furious; the daguerreotype in 1839; the ambrotype in 1851; the tintype in 1856. The United States had no shortage of tinkerers, and like characters in Hawthorne short story, these wizards drew from science, experimenting with bits of silver, iodine and even egg whites to cheat nature out of her secrets. Hawthorne placed a daguerreotypist in “The House of the Seven Gables,” and like many other writers, believed that there was something supernatural about creating perfect portraits — “ghosts,” in his words — that would live on long after death. Who needs vampires?

The process of creating ghosts was messy and slow . Photographers were artists as well as scientists, and many of the earliest pioneers, like Samuel F. B. Morse, were painters, deeply enamored with the human form. An early student of Morse’s, a failed painter with terrible vision named Mathew Brady, borrowed from both science and art as he established a thriving photography business in New York and Washington.

For Lincoln, this dark technology was a godsend. Despite his penchant for making fun of his appearance, Lincoln knew that his “phiz” was instantly recognizable, all the more so after hair began to appear on it. And recognizability was an asset when all known facts relating to the government of the United States were up for grabs. Presidents have to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time; highly visible to the public on certain stage-managed occasions, and then quite invisible when there is work to be done. (It is still the same in 2011, when there is always an effervescent “Photo of the Day” on the White House Web site .) In the early months of his presidency, Lincoln more than tolerated his photographers; he intuitively understood that they were helping him a great deal as he tried to give the Union a face — his own.

Over the spring of 1861, as the new government came into focus, so did Lincoln. It was natural that he would be drawn to Mathew Brady, the self-made man whose studio was just down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. Lincoln said, “Brady and the Cooper Institute made me president.” For on the same day that he gave the great Cooper Union address, in February 1860, he did something just as significant when he stopped at Brady’s New York studio for a likeness .

Mathew Brady Photographs Lincoln - NYTimes.com

Despite recent rumors to the contrary , Lincoln displayed no vampiric powers in his early presidency. But it is true that he could appear many places at the same time, thanks to a chemical process that seemed to borrow as much from the dark arts as from science.

Photography was a fluid technique in 1861, in every sense. It had made rapid strides since the first inchoate smudges of a backyard in France were captured in 1826, the year that Jefferson and Adams died. (That first photo, locked in a vault in Texas, can be seen here .)

Improvements followed fast and furious; the daguerreotype in 1839; the ambrotype in 1851; the tintype in 1856. The United States had no shortage of tinkerers, and like characters in Hawthorne short story, these wizards drew from science, experimenting with bits of silver, iodine and even egg whites to cheat nature out of her secrets. Hawthorne placed a daguerreotypist in “The House of the Seven Gables,” and like many other writers, believed that there was something supernatural about creating perfect portraits — “ghosts,” in his words — that would live on long after death. Who needs vampires?

The process of creating ghosts was messy and slow . Photographers were artists as well as scientists, and many of the earliest pioneers, like Samuel F. B. Morse, were painters, deeply enamored with the human form. An early student of Morse’s, a failed painter with terrible vision named Mathew Brady, borrowed from both science and art as he established a thriving photography business in New York and Washington.

For Lincoln, this dark technology was a godsend. Despite his penchant for making fun of his appearance, Lincoln knew that his “phiz” was instantly recognizable, all the more so after hair began to appear on it. And recognizability was an asset when all known facts relating to the government of the United States were up for grabs. Presidents have to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time; highly visible to the public on certain stage-managed occasions, and then quite invisible when there is work to be done. (It is still the same in 2011, when there is always an effervescent “Photo of the Day” on the White House Web site .) In the early months of his presidency, Lincoln more than tolerated his photographers; he intuitively understood that they were helping him a great deal as he tried to give the Union a face — his own.

Over the spring of 1861, as the new government came into focus, so did Lincoln. It was natural that he would be drawn to Mathew Brady, the self-made man whose studio was just down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. Lincoln said, “Brady and the Cooper Institute made me president.” For on the same day that he gave the great Cooper Union address, in February 1860, he did something just as significant when he stopped at Brady’s New York studio for a likeness .

Reading American photographs, images as history, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans

Photo by Brady, a picture of the Civil War

Mathew Brady and the Image of History

Brady's Civil War, A Collection of Memorable Civil War Images Photographed by Matthew Brady and His Assistants

In the wake of battle, the Civil War images of Mathew Brady