Thoughts on the Power of Early Photography (From a Mathew Brady Bio)

The start of Chapter 3 in "Mathew Brady: Portraits of a Nation" mentions something that I've pondered a lot. And it shares 3 points that I have brought up in my photography classes for years: the inital importance of early photographs can't be comprehended today; photography was a subtle way to level out different classes of people; and because photography was considered to be more of a "truthful" science, it took a lot of work for it to be accepted as "art:"

Americans in the 1840s and '50s embraced the new and growing art of photography. The availability of images from the most distant places on earth made the world a more knowable place, a revolution in human knowledge comparable to the invention of moveable type or the Internet. But of more immediate personal value was the possibility of having images of yourself and the people you loved fixed forever in a form you could possess and pass on. Suddenly a kind of immortality previously available only to the rich, who could aford to have their portraits paint, or to those with the means to commission a miniature from an itinerant painter, was now within the reach of almost everyone. Even if you could afford a painted portrait, the result would be another person's impression or interpretation of what you looked like. This new medium, it was generally agreed, portrayed you as you really were. At a time when children often did not survive childhood and might be remembered only by a posthumous photo taken of them in burial clothes, or when a son who went out west in search of gold had little hope of communicating with the family he had left behind, or they with him, or a husband went to sea leaving a wife and family whose images he might gaze upon and who themselves could not know when or if he would return, the small daguerreotypes that people in the 1840s and '50s rushed to have made had a value that we can only guess at today.

Wilson also makes an interesting point 2 paragraphs later in the same chapter:

Photography was also among the first examples (along with the telegraph and the railway) of a phenomenon that has become almost commonplace in our time - an advance in technology that transforms rapidly from a state of inconceivable mystery or even magic to something that everyone would and must have access to. In his 1853 dictionary, Noah Webster ended a brief description of the daguerreotype process with "and then the images appear as by enchantment." Photography was at first as surprising as the possibility of wireless telephone communication seemed to us two decades ago, and then as urgent a necessary as the smartphone today.

This book was published nearly a decade ago, so you might change that last sentence to THREE decades ago as Wilson writes about "wireless telephones." But the point still stands.

New Photo Book

Two weeks ago, I stepped foot inside of my local St. Paul Public Library for the first time since early March. (Thanks COVID.) I walked back to the photo section and found a book about Mathew Brady right next to "Capturing the Light" which I read a few months ago:

I brought it home:

I'm 4 chapters in, and I actually took it to both of my photography classes to read a bit from it because it related directly to our discussion.

I think I've read more photo books this year than in the last many years combined: that started with "Chase the Light" (which was still the best one [most entertaining]), and then "L. J. M. Daguerre: The Worlds First Photographer and Inventor of the Daguerreotype" (which I shared parts of here and here), and also "Speculating Daguerre".

So far, this book by Robert Wilson is a bit dry, and there isn't much known about Brady's life, so there's not the personal details like those from "Chase the Light" that I enjoyed so much about Talbot and Daguerre. But it was a nice continuation from the historically earlier books that I read this past winter.

Old Photos in Class

I often share a "nerdy" photo of what the whiteboard looks like after our first week or 2 of class as it's fill with all kinds of photo notes (take this post from last September as an example). But this semester, I thought I'd share a photo I recently instagrammed of some old photos I brought into class:

Caption: "Brought in some old photos to share in my class today. The one on the right was a big hit
because both of these men have their head clamped in with a Brady Stand, and the standing man
has eerie painted pupils because he must have blinked during the long exposure."

And then I added a comment with more info: "Note the base of a stand behind the standing man, and you can see something between the legs of the guy who's sitting. Their heads are clamped in the back so they don't move during the exposure."

We had just talked during the class before about early film exposures and the long exposure time they needed. Oh, and there's a dead baby photo in the lower left. Morbid. But not uncommon.