Though it was a relatively new art form, photography helped put a human face on warfare. People on the home front were confronted with hundreds of images of war's inevitable death and destruction. Famous photographers include George Barnard, Alexander and James Gardner, George Cook, Timothy O'Sullivan, and, of course, Mathew Brady.

Studio photographers in cities and towns across the nation captured the many emotions of families who found themselves thrown into conflict. Understandably, photographs of family and friends were cherished mementos among soldiers in the field. Mathew Brady has been called the father of contemporary photojournalism, and with good reason. The photographs taken by Brady and his staff chronicled a war in progress for the first time.

Brady's photographic outfit in the field near Petersburg, Virginia, 1864Photo courtesy of the National Archives (111-B-5077)

Before discovering photography, Brady worked as a painter and a craftsman of jewelry boxes. His life changed when he started experimenting with the daguerreotype photographic process. He opened a portrait studio in New York in 1844, found great success photographing celebrities, and opened a second studio in Washington, D.C., in 1858. By the time the Civil War started, Brady was using a new wet-plate photographic process. Its mobility, he realized, would allow photographers to document the conflict at the scene, and he turned his back on studio portraits to follow Union troops. Brady's photography wagon, which went with him to the battlefield, was a marvel. He started calling it his “What-is-it-wagon” because that's what people would ask wherever he went. Soon Brady and his staff became well known, and soldiers realized that at least one photographer would probably be present at every major battle.

The photographic process was slow and exposures were typically long, which explains why there are very few actual battle scenes. As the war went on, Brady's eyesight began to fail, so he hired a staff of photographers to continue his work. Few, however, received the credit due them, and Brady's name appeared on many photographs that he did not shoot. Several of the photographers under Brady's employ eventually went off on their own, seeking fame and fortune by covering the war for newspapers, magazines, and historical archives.

Brady and his staff managed to produce more than 3,500 photographs covering nearly every aspect of the war, including camp life, military portraits, and the aftermath of battle. Brady realized the importance of composition in a photograph and encouraged his staff to pose live soldiers as if they were going off to battle and to rearrange corpses for better visual effect.