April 17, 2006
Mathew Brady and Mass Media Posted by John Steele Gordon at 07:00 PM EST Richard Snow writes that “it’s important to remember the terrific emotional impact photographs of the Civil War era had upon those who saw them at the time.” I couldn’t agree more. But I wonder how many people actually saw the photographs in anything like real time. The half-tone process wouldn’t be developed until the 1890s, so newspapers and magazines had no photographs in the 1860s. Hastily made engravings based on photographs appeared in magazines such as Harper’s Weekly, but they are a pale rendition of the original photographs. People living in New York and other major cities with the leisure to do so could visit exhibitions or Brady’s studio, but they would have been a small percentage of the population as a whole. The chattering classes saw them—or heard about them from their friends—the editorialist of The New York Times that Richard quotes being a case in point. But the chattering classes and the masses are two different groups even now, and the distinction was far deeper in the 1860s. So I wonder what percentage of the American population in the war years actually saw an example of Brady’s war photography. I have no idea. Ten percent? I bet not. One percent? That would have been 300,000 people. Maybe. Compare that with the number of people who today see some dramatic footage within 24 hours of its being shot. What percentage of the American population saw video of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center before they went to bed that night? Eighty percent? Ninety? Ninety-five? The fact that Brady is today probably the only nineteenth-century photographer that the average educated American could name testifies to just how powerful his images are. But I wonder how much impact they had on the average man in the street in his day whose ability to actually see them was so very limited by technology.
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