HF The History of Photography 600pág

272 The collodion period
Pl 144
Gardner team are better known today than those of the Brady team. Gardner was
quick to publish two volumes each containing 50 original prints, nearly half of them
acknowledged to O'Sullivan, accompanied by text.9 They contain among others the
historic photograph of President Lincoln visiting the Headquarters of the Army of
the Potomac in October r 862, a group which includes the Commander-in-Chief,
Ceneral George B. McClellan, whom Lincoln relieved of the High Command the
Pl 146 same day. O'Sullivan's most famous picture, 'The Harvest of Death', was taken the
morning after the Battle of Gettysburg, July r 86 3, and is an unforgettable record of
Pl 147 the horrors of war. Horrifying in a different way is Gardner's photograph of the
execution of the conspirators against Lincoln, who were hanged in the Washington
-Penitentiary yard in July 1865.
Brady had sunk a fortune of $roo,ooo (then about £25,000), some of it borrowed,
in his war recording organization, and despite the fact that his portrait studios were
still churning out carte-de-visite portraits by the thousand he was reduced to financial
ruin by the end of the war and forced to sell his New York studio. His ability to
sell prints to the public was greatly limited by the fact that he had ceded to the New
York firm of Edward Anthony & Co. a set of several thousand duplicate negatives,
together with their copyright, in settlement of a debt of $25,000 for photographic
materials supplied to him. Whilst Anthony did excellent business for some years with
the sale of prints from these negatives, the commercial value of Brady's own setand
each subject had been taken twice or even three times in 8 in. x ro in. and stereo
size-had thereby been greatly reduced and even its historic importance was naturally
diminished by the fact that the set was not unique. Brady's confidence that the
Government would buy his set of negatives proved unfounded, for there were QQ W
urgent problems o[ reconstruction to be faced. No action was taken either when in
r 871 the Library of Congress recommended the purchase of 2,000 of Brady's
national portraits. Three years later, to recover storage charges, 6,ooo out of the 8,ooo
war negatives were disposed of by auction and acquired by the U.S. War Department
by defraying the amount due. There they lay completely neglected for many
decades until transfered in the l 9 3 os to the National Archives in Washington.
Though Congress paid Brady $25,000 for the copyright of these 6,ooo negatives
(which had been appraised at $150,000 by General, later President, Garfield), even
this was only a token sum. After the closing of his New York studio Brady had
moved to Washing ton where he continued his portrait studio assisted by his nephew
by marriage, Levin C. Handy. He died in the poor ward of a New York hospital in
r 896, embittered and disappointed at the indifference shown towards the record
which he had anticipated would be treasured in American history-as indeed it is
today.
During the Second World War the Library of Congress acquired the neglected
and forgotten hoard of nearly ro,ooo war negatives 'stored since 1916 in a basement
vault next to the coal-bin'. This stock includes the negatives acquired by Anthony,
and others by Gardner and his staff More recently the Library bought another 3,000
negatives belonging to Levin C. Handy, chiefly portraits of celebrities, and thus
became the largest depository of Brady material1° over eighty years after it had been
first suggested.
Brady was brilliant as an organizer rather than as a photographer. He assembled
an almost complete pictorial record of the Civil War from the Union side, but out
of the thousands of negatives taken, only the extremely small number of 84 could
be ascribed to him with certainty by James D. Horan.11 The general tendency to
label all Civil War photographs as Brady's work may be partly due to ignorance and