I wish this particular Hallmark Hall of Fame play would be rebroadcast. I don't know what it was like, or even if it was well played, but the subject is a fascinating one. For it dealt with a man that Americans remember, but for what he did to record his time - not for who or what he himself was.
Modern photography took a long time to be discovered. Beginning with toys like "camera obscura" which enabled artists to create shadow "photos" of people to create silhouettes, the type of device that we recognize as a modern camera only arrived in 1839 or so when the Frenchman Louis Daguerre created a camera that photographed on a glass plate. Others would soon add to the new art form, like William Fox-Talbot and Sir John Herschell in England, and (when not involved with painting or his telegraph) Samuel Morse. But in the 1850s Matthew Harrison Brady appeared. He was among the first photographers who set up a studio (in New York City) for taking photographs. But it would be mostly photos of the elite of the day.
It was something of a difficulty to take photographs in the early 19th Century. It took several minutes of posing the subject who could not move until the picture was finally taken. Heads were propped up with wire supports on chairs. No muscles could shift. At least they shouldn't. Dolley Madison, one of the oldest celebrated Americans to get her picture taken, always got bored waiting and shifted her head, so that her pictures always show her moving.
Still Americans took to the new art form. Although created in the late 1830s, every U.S. President from John Quincy Adams (1825 - 1829) onward was photographed, including William Henry Harrison. And when they got photographed it was by an expert like Brady. He was good at posing his subjects, so that their characters seem to come out of the pictures. Daniel Webster's pictures showed him grimly determined, but also magnificently domed - truly "the "Godlike" Daniel". Martin Van Buren is shown from the side in one picture, as though considering some political maneuver he has not tried before, a slight smile on his face. Edgar Allan Poe looks wearily at his viewer, as though the horrors in his mind will be too much for that person to comprehend easily.
Brady took the pictures of every major figure of the 1850s - 1870s in the U.S., and he made portrait photography an art form in the process. He would eventually turn his studio into a New York landmark of the day, with people visiting his portrait gallery to see what he could accomplish. So famous did Brady become, that in the American Civil War he would become the first great war photographer, going around battlefields and shooting the men of both sides, living and dead. Truth be told, some historian have been critical of Brady's war pictures - for all their value as a record of the conflict he did pose people (and dead bodies) for the effect of the shots.
Brady would live until 1896, and (in his later years) he would suffer serious financial losses. But photography,which was an experimental item at best in its first decade, was turned into the critical historical record that it has since become. And soon other photographers, like Muybridge, would take it one step further to record motion (not like Dolley Madison, by accident, but by serious meticulous recording of multiple pictures). Next time you admire the cinematography of a fine movie, or look at the portrait of some idol you adore, you are looking at the modern descendants of the work that Matthew Brady started in the middle years of the 19th Century - 160 years ago.
Modern photography took a long time to be discovered. Beginning with toys like "camera obscura" which enabled artists to create shadow "photos" of people to create silhouettes, the type of device that we recognize as a modern camera only arrived in 1839 or so when the Frenchman Louis Daguerre created a camera that photographed on a glass plate. Others would soon add to the new art form, like William Fox-Talbot and Sir John Herschell in England, and (when not involved with painting or his telegraph) Samuel Morse. But in the 1850s Matthew Harrison Brady appeared. He was among the first photographers who set up a studio (in New York City) for taking photographs. But it would be mostly photos of the elite of the day.
It was something of a difficulty to take photographs in the early 19th Century. It took several minutes of posing the subject who could not move until the picture was finally taken. Heads were propped up with wire supports on chairs. No muscles could shift. At least they shouldn't. Dolley Madison, one of the oldest celebrated Americans to get her picture taken, always got bored waiting and shifted her head, so that her pictures always show her moving.
Still Americans took to the new art form. Although created in the late 1830s, every U.S. President from John Quincy Adams (1825 - 1829) onward was photographed, including William Henry Harrison. And when they got photographed it was by an expert like Brady. He was good at posing his subjects, so that their characters seem to come out of the pictures. Daniel Webster's pictures showed him grimly determined, but also magnificently domed - truly "the "Godlike" Daniel". Martin Van Buren is shown from the side in one picture, as though considering some political maneuver he has not tried before, a slight smile on his face. Edgar Allan Poe looks wearily at his viewer, as though the horrors in his mind will be too much for that person to comprehend easily.
Brady took the pictures of every major figure of the 1850s - 1870s in the U.S., and he made portrait photography an art form in the process. He would eventually turn his studio into a New York landmark of the day, with people visiting his portrait gallery to see what he could accomplish. So famous did Brady become, that in the American Civil War he would become the first great war photographer, going around battlefields and shooting the men of both sides, living and dead. Truth be told, some historian have been critical of Brady's war pictures - for all their value as a record of the conflict he did pose people (and dead bodies) for the effect of the shots.
Brady would live until 1896, and (in his later years) he would suffer serious financial losses. But photography,which was an experimental item at best in its first decade, was turned into the critical historical record that it has since become. And soon other photographers, like Muybridge, would take it one step further to record motion (not like Dolley Madison, by accident, but by serious meticulous recording of multiple pictures). Next time you admire the cinematography of a fine movie, or look at the portrait of some idol you adore, you are looking at the modern descendants of the work that Matthew Brady started in the middle years of the 19th Century - 160 years ago.
