January 2010 HARDCOVER ISBN 13: 978-1-55595-326-3 ISBN: 1-55595-326-3 300 pages 9 1/4 x 10 1/4 24 x 26 cm 266 color plates 17 black & white US $ 60
|
Ransoming Mathew Brady
John Ransom Phillips with Alan Trachtenberg
♦ This study includes more than 50 oil paintings, 200 watercolors, and
40 late nineteenth-century photographs
In a series of oils, watercolors, and prose rich with historical allusion,
John Ransom Phillips portrays the complexity of nineteenth-century
pho tographer Mathew Brady. The photographs Brady made have long
served to illustrate an era in American history, most notably his portraits of
Abraham Lincoln and the images from the Civil War battlefields he captured.
Pairing these photographs with his own work, Philips explores the career
of this artist who wanted to make history and who had the genius to
look beyond his New York portrait studio to the Civil War battlefields.
Paradoxically, Brady sent assistants to photograph his most famous
scenes, the battlefields at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Antietam, instructing
them to re-arrange the dead to create images that would capture the public’s
interest.
|
|