Mathew B. Brady was already a famous photographer by the time the Civil War began. But the war gave Brady something else:

The chance to make a RECORD OF A WAR – this war – in a way that had never been done before: WITH TRUE-TO-LIFE PICTURES INSTEAD OF JUST WORDS. He hired field photographers to travel with the troops, equipped them with cameras and wagons filled with supplies, and sent them out with the directive to make a visual record of the war and to show people scenes they could have only read about before.

The pictures the field photographers sent back were HAUNTING, BEAUTIFUL, DEVASTATING, AND TOTALLY UNFORGETTABLE. And thousands of them included the notation Photo by Brady. Though Brady didn’t actually take the photographs, he was the genius behind them. His vision and foresight gave the country images that not only touched the people at the time, but have gone on to leave an indelible mark on the collective memory of this country. And the name of Mathew Brady will always be remembered with them.

In Photo By Brady, Jennifer Armstrong tells the story of the Civil War as seen through the lenses of its recorders. It is a moving and elegant look at the brutal and deadly ti