Lecture Date: January 22, 2015
Mathew Brady is often given credit for Civil War photographs that he did not take, but he was directly responsible for scores of interesting images from the war years, including more than a dozen in which he himself appears. In his half-century as an icon of American photography, Brady had many crucial roles in the medium’s development—as innovator, entrepreneur, mentor, role model, collector, and booster of the form’s artistic potential—but his achievement in the actual making of photographs, before, during, and after the war, should not be overlooked. Using a number of Brady images to prove his case, Robert Wilson draws from his recent biography, Mathew Brady: Portraits of a Nation, to reintroduce the photographs of the single most important American in photography’s first decades.
Lecture Photos
Speaker: Robert Wilson
Robert Wilson has been editor of The American Scholar since 2004. Before that, he was editor of Preservation, founding literary editor of Civilization, book editor and book columnist at USA Today, and an assistant editor at The Washington Post. He has taught writing at the University of Virginia, George Mason, American University, and Johns Hopkins. He is the author of two biographies: The Explorer King(Scribner, 2006), about the writer, geologist, and explorer Clarence King, and Mathew Brady, Portraits of a Nation (Bloomsbury, 2013). He is at work on a biography of P.T. Barnum.