About this item
In the s and s Brady of Broadway was one of the most successful and acclaimed Manhattan portrait galleries Henry Clay Daniel Webster Dolley Madison Henry James as a boy with his father Horace Greeley Edgar Allan Poe the Prince of Wales and Jenny Lind were among the dignitaries photographed in Mathew Bradys studio But it was during the Civil War that he became the founding father of what is now called photojournalism and his photography became an enduring part of American historyThe Civil War was the first war in history to leave a detailed photographic record and Mathew Brady was the wars chief visual historian Previously the general public had never seen in such detail the bloody particulars of war--the strewn bodies of the dead the bloated carcasses of horses the splintered remains of trees and fortifications the chaos and suffering on the battlefield Brady knew better than anyone of his era the dual power of the camera to record and to excite to stop a moment in time and to draw the viewer vividly into that momentHe was not in the strictest sense a Civil War photographer As the director of a photographic service he assigned Alexander Gardner James F Gibson and others to take photographs often under his personal supervision he also distributed Civil War photographs taken by others not employed by him Ironically Brady had accompanied the Union army to the first major battle at Bull Run but was so shaken by the experience that throughout the rest of the war he rarely visited battlefields except well before or after a major battle The famous Brady photographs at Antietam were shot by Gardner and GibsonFew books about Brady have gone beyond being collections of the photographs attributed to him accompanied by a biographical sketch MATHEW BRADY will be the biography of an American legend--a businessman an accomplished and innovative technician a suave promoter a celebrated portrait artist and perhaps most important a historian who chronicled America during its finest and gravest moments of the th century.
About the Author
Robert Wilson has written thirteen novels including the Bruce Medway noir series set in West Africa and two Lisbon books with WW2 settings the first of which, A Small Death in Lisbon, won the CWA Gold Dagger in 1999 and the International Deutsche Krimi prize in 2003. He has written four psychological crime novels set in Seville, with his Spanish detective, Javier Falcón. Two of these books (The Blind Man of Seville and The Silent and the Damned) were filmed and broadcast on Sky Atlantic as ??Falcón?? in 2012. A film of the fourth Falcón book was released in Spain in 2014 under the title La Ignorancia de la Sangre. Capital Punishment, the first novel in his latest series of pure thrillers set in London and featuring kidnap consultant, Charles Boxer, was published in 2013 and was nominated for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger. This was followed by You Will Never Find Me in 2014. The third book in the series, Stealing People, will be published in 2015. Robert Wilson loves to cook food from all over the world but especially Spanish, Portuguese, Indian and Thai. He also loves to walk with dogs?¦and people, too.
