Theater of War
According to Nathaniel Hawthorne, who met Abraham Lincoln in March of 1862, one
year into the Civil War, Lincoln looked like a country schoolmaster: He was
"about the homeliest man I ever saw." Lincoln's hair was "black, still unmixed
with gray, stiff, somewhat bushy, and had apparently been acquainted with
neither brush nor comb that morning, after the disarrangement of the
pillow."
The man
who spruced up the shaggy president for posterity was Mathew Brady, and a brush
and comb were the least of his tools of transformation, as a comprehensive
exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington makes abundantly
clear. Brady's studio assistants used vises and braces to keep their subjects
still, columns and drapes to make them look distinguished, light and shade to
give them depth and stature. When Lincoln posed for Brady in 1860, during a
campaign swing through New York City, Brady's staff retouched the negative to
reel in Lincoln's roving left eye, and erased the lines on his face. The
shimmering and widely published result, according to Lincoln, "made me
President." A Brady Lincoln is on the penny, and another on the five-dollar
bill.
This exhibition, along with the excellent
catalog by curator Mary Panzer, is out to correct the impression that Brady
captured the look of his times with the new apparatus that couldn't lie. Brady
is often credited with bringing the war home, in the images that appeared in
newspapers all across the North. Brady's name, in fact, has become all but
synonymous with Civil War photography. While it is probably true, as Susan
Sontag has argued, that Brady's images of the horrors of the battlefields "did
not make people any less keen to go on with the Civil War," he did convey to
his audience the sheer human cost of the war. He also inspired generations of
photographers--especially such 1930s masters of documentation as Berenice
Abbott and Walker Evans--with the idea that there was something peculiarly
American about the pitiless gaze of the camera. "If he has not brought bodies
and laid them in our door-yards and along the streets," wrote a New York
Times editorialist at the time, "he has done something very like it." These
were the images that lit a fire in the brain of Stephen Crane when he was
writing The Red Badge of Courage 30 years later.
But
actually, as Panzer's catalog makes clear, Brady was put off by corpses. The
stunning images of the Antietam dead, lying in ditches where they fell, are the
work (published under Brady's name) of his brilliant assistants Alexander
Gardner and Timothy O'Sullivan. (You can see some of these battlefield photos
in
Slate
's "The Taste for Taboo.")
Far from being a documentarian, Brady
considered himself an artist, and his images, in the jargon of current art
history, were highly "constructed." When a general failed to show up for a
group photograph of Gen. William Sherman and his staff, Brady had him
photographed the next day, and spliced his image into the ensemble. When the
faces of the Senate committee convened to impeach President Andrew Jackson
looked too sour, Brady painted in a reassuringly genteel background. For a few
hundred dollars, he was willing to go all the way, and replace the grays of a
photograph with painted colors.
Brady
worked in close collaboration with painters. Lincoln died in a room barely
large enough to hold his bed, but Brady photographed the multitude of mourners
one by one in his studio, and the painter Alonzo Chappel assembled them (often
in the exact poses Brady had choreographed) in a monumental and wildly popular
painting, The Last Hours of Lincoln (1868).
That Brady was a great photographer who did not
take photographs was merely the most obvious of the many paradoxes of his
career. He was an impresario and a brand name, hiring talented assistants
(several of whom went on to become major photographers in their own right) to
shoot, color, and otherwise alter first daguerreotypes, and then--Brady was
always up on the latest technical innovations--stereographs, ambrotypes,
Imperial salted paper prints, and other photographic exotica. During the Civil
War, Brady sent teams of assistants into the battlefields. His own whereabouts
during much of the war remain unknown. A possible reason for this has come to
light: While pursuing Gen. Grant for portraits late in the war, Brady was
apparently using his knowledge of troop movements to speculate on Wall Street,
sending coded messages through intermediaries in New York. One of Grant's
assistants got wind of the scheme, and asked Assistant Secretary of War Charles
Dana to tell Grant "how he is being deceived by one to whom he has granted
various privileges and favors." But Grant remained a stalwart supporter of
Brady.
The
wizard behind these Oz-like wonders remains elusive--we don't even know what
year Mathew Brady was born, though 1823 is the usual guess. His childhood in
upstate New York is a blank. Brady had serious eye trouble from his youth on;
an oil portrait in the show, by his friend Charles Loring Elliott, shows him
wearing thick spectacles. Brady made his way to New York City, and by 1843,
five years after Daguerre announced his new invention, he was already active in
the slightly disreputable trade of photography, manufacturing the leather and
metal cases for holding daguerreotypes. Brady's first published work was an
1846 collaboration, with the female warden of Sing Sing, on a phrenological
study of prison inmates--the sort of analysis of "criminal physiognomy" that
later influenced painters like Degas and the poet Baudelaire. Though Brady
never acknowledged the project, he remained in close touch with quacks. A
detailed phrenological analysis of Brady himself, dating from 1858--the year
that Brady moved his base of operations from New York City to Washington,
D.C.--is included in the exhibition catalog.
A tireless self-promoter (a friend described
him as "felicitously prehensile"), Brady was camera-shy, placing himself on the
margins of photographs in which he appeared or, more often, with his back
turned. But theatricality is the hallmark of his work. He loved to photograph
actors, the more flamboyant the better. He was apparently drawn to women who
specialized in "trouser roles"--three are on display in the exhibition,
including a particularly intense ambrotype (a cheaper and less luminous form of
daguerreotype) of Felicita Vestvali, a lesbian who often appeared as Hamlet.
Brady also delighted in Indian costumes: among his photographs are those of a
Ute delegation negotiating a treaty in Washington and of the actor Edwin
Forrest in warpath regalia as the Indian prince Metamora.
When Brady
photographed the leaders of the antebellum years--Daniel Webster, Henry Clay,
and the rest--he turned them into actors too. They strike heroic, Napoleonic
poses, hand to heart, which made these wafflers and compromisers look
ridiculous after the debacle of the Civil War. (If you want to see the original
of the pose, you can cross the Mall to the National Gallery, where
Jacques-Louis David's 1812 Napoleon in His Study hangs.)
But for Brady himself, war
never quite lost its theatricality. Unlike his cold-eyed assistants, he
preferred to visit the battlefield after the corpses had been cleared away.
There he would stand, his back turned to us like the contemplative artist
figure in a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, and reflect on the glory and
folly of mankind. Mathew Brady died in 1896. Elusive till the end, he was
scheduled to lecture, two weeks later, on his life and work as a war
photographer--with slides and patriotic music--at Carnegie Hall.
