MATTHEW BRADY AND HIS OPERATIVES “The camera is the eye of history.” Matthew Brady From Portraiture to the Civil War It is unclear precisely when Matthew Brady was born, in fact, in an 1891 interview, the photographer himself said “I go back to near...
PHOTOGRAPHING THE AMERICAN WEST PART ONE Carleton Watkins in Yosemite In a virtually unreadable book on the discovery of the California territory called “Yosemite,” the first owner of a tourist establishment in what became a national park, James M....
SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION Artful Photography Julia Margaret Cameron and the Eminent Victorians Julia Margaret Cameron knew absolutely everyone worth knowing in Victorian England or she was connected to someone who knew those she did not know. Her connections to the...
NADAR AND THE CELEBRITIES Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (1820-1910) The poet and art critic, Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), who never met a camera he didn’t pose for, wrote a famous diatribe against photography and its narcissistic pleasures. After a long preamble...
THE TROUBLESOME AMATEUR Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) A Question of Interpretation For early photographers one of the most astonishing aspects of camera vision was the lack of control of the maker. The plethora of detail must have been particularly shocking for those...
THE CAMERA AND THE WAR Matthew Brady’s Operatives “My greatest aim has been to advance the art of photography and to make it what I think I have, a great and truthful medium of history.” Matthew Brady Without a doubt the best book written on the...
