Ransoming Mathew Brady
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Individual Artists
Ransoming Mathew Brady Details
—This study includes more than 50 oil paintings, 200 watercolors, and 40 late nineteenth-century photographs In a series of oils, watercolors, and prose rich with historical allusion, John Ransom Phillips portrays the complexity of nineteenth-century pho tographer Mathew Brady. The photographs Brady made have long served to illustrate an era in American history, most notably his portraits of Abraham Lincoln and the images from the Civil War battlefields he captured. Pairing these photographs with his own work, Philips explores the career of this artist who wanted to make history and who had the genius to look beyond his New York portrait studio to the Civil War battlefields. Paradoxically, Brady sent assistants to photograph his most famous scenes, the battlefields at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Antietam, instructing them to re-arrange the dead to create images that would capture the public's interest.
Reviews
This brilliant book on the career and work of Mathew Brady is a complex and beautiful - and haunting - examination of Mathew Brady and his role in documenting the Civil War. The essays by Alan Trachtenberg offer new and compelling insights into the career of the first famous photographer. John Ransom Phillips watercolors and oils are beautiful representations of the horrific images that made Brady a household name. Phillips work never fails to transform the hard realities of the world into beauty and truth. Time spent with his images always enlightens, and leaves one feeling that, no matter the subject, there is beauty in the world.