Pixiq

It can be easy to forget how the world viewed things before photography. Until the invention of photography, wars were viewed as remote and rather exciting to the people at home far removed from the events taking place. Details of war were learned through delayed and biased news accounts or from returning soldiers. There were paintings and poems as well.

The British campaigns in the Crimean War of the 1850s were among the first to be extensively documented by photograph. This was a disastrous war for Great Britain. The ill-fated Charge of the Light Brigade was only one of the catastrophes; official blundering, disease, starvation and exposure took more British lives than did their enemy. However, Roger Fenton, the official photographer, generally showed views of the war as idealized as Tennyson’s poem about the Charge.

It wasn’t until the American Civil War that many photographs started to appear that showed a less romantic side of war. Mathew B. Brady, a successful portrait photographer, conceived the idea of sending photographic teams to document the war. You didn’t want this job, I promise. The collodion process required up to several seconds’ exposure and the glass plates had to be process in the field. This happened to make the photographer’s darkroom-wagon a target for enemy gunners.

American Civil War Photo

Initially Brady hoped to sell his photographs as fine art but was unsuccessful as the images depicted scenes and imagery that people wanted to forget.

While Brady only took a few photographs himself, the team he set up and the vision and personal investment proved an invaluable documentation of American history and the birth of the wartime photographer.