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as a function of archival projects. The political world
itself began during the 1850s to realize the impact of
photography as a means of publicity and emotional ef-
fect; this is how, during the 1860 Presidential campaign,
Mathew Brady became “Mr. Lincoln’s camera man.”
Finally, the new cultural role of photography in Ameri-
can society was recorded in much writing of the time,
from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven
Gables (1851), the fi rst major piece of fi ction probably
anywhere in the world to stage a photographer (in this
case a daguerreotypist) as a protagonist, to dozens of
more popular novels, tales and stories exploiting the
supposed “mysteries of the darkrooms” and the magic
powers of the camera, and to the more philosophical
refl ections of Emerson, Holmes, and others; around
1860, Walt Whitman had become the fi rst major public
image of a writer through photography.
These various trends truly gained full force during
and immediately after the Civil War, as the glass-plate,
negative-positive processes fi nally superseded the da-
guerreotype, now making the multiplication of prints a
defi ning aspect of photographic practice and business.
The Civil War itself provided direct and decisive impetus
for the suddenly accelerating spread of photography in
American society and institutions. What is most obvi-
ous and most often mentioned in this connection is the
outstanding and unprecedented body of thousands of
photographs of the war that were produced by the hun-
dreds of photographers associated with the Union army,
many of them in the employ of Mathew Brady (such asUNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Southworth, Albert Sands and
Josiah Johnson Hawes. Young
Girl with Portrait of George
Washington.
The Metropolitan Museum
of Art, Gift of I.N. Phelps
Stokes, Edward S. Hawes,
Alice Mary Hawes, and
Marion Augusta Hawes, 1937
(37.14.53) Image © The
Metropolitan Museum of Art.